


we're painted red to fit right in

by stars_inthe_sky



Series: tell me where your strength lies [2]
Category: Terminator (Movies), Terminator - All Media Types, Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, The Terminator (1984)
Genre: Alternate Canon, Alternate Timelines, Apocalypse, Bechdel Test Pass, F/M, Families of Choice, Family, Gen, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Post-Apocalypse, Unconventional Families
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-27
Updated: 2013-08-27
Packaged: 2017-12-24 19:06:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 28,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/943559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stars_inthe_sky/pseuds/stars_inthe_sky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“But you want to be with him,” Savannah says. There’s that distant look in Sarah’s eyes, the one she gets when she’s thinking too hard about John or her past. “I don’t know how not to.”</i>
</p><p>They may be at the eye of the storm, but there’s more than one war to fight post-Judgment Day—and not all of them are against the machines. (Second in a series)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 2018

** 2018 **

The crate won’t unpack itself, which is a shame, because there’s the outline of a padlock buried somewhere underneath layers and layers of duct tape, so doing it by hand will take a while. Whoever packed the damn box didn’t label it beyond writing “GUNS,” so the only way to find out if it actually contains what she needs is to open it.

Savannah draws her switchblade out from its usual place in her right boot and starts sawing. The knife is serrated enough to do the trick, but not quickly, and she mentally curses the so-called soldier who had decided to be as unhelpful as possible. She drags the crate from the storage cave to a shallow niche nearby with a dim but steadily-lit bulb on the side of the tunnel and goes back to work

She’s concentrating hard enough on the task at hand that she hardly notices the pair of passersby until one of them asks in a deep voice, “Need help with that?”

“Sure, yeah.”

Savannah rocks back on her heels to get a better look at the two men—boys, really—as they kneel down and unsheathe pocketknives similar to hers. They look too much alike not to be related; the older one who had spoken to her is maybe twenty, with broad shoulders, dark hair, and friendly eyes. If she were the sort to care, she’d probably call him attractive.

The other one looks around her age, maybe a bit younger. He’s thinner and a little shorter than his companion in face and body, but they share the same lean, muscled build of anybody who’s spent the last three years surviving in the system of tunnels under what used to be Los Angeles.

Both of them are staring at her, she realizes, so she goes back to sawing and is relieved that they start to follow suit. All this time, and she still doesn’t relate well to her peers. At seventeen, she’s found most of them to be less silly and stupid than she used to. That’s by necessity, of course: the ones who had made it past Judgment Day and into tunnel life had had to harden like she had or get killed. But the first fifteen or so years of her life had entailed interacting almost exclusively with adults, and she’s never quite snapped out of that mindset.

 After a couple of minutes, the older one speaks up again.

“You got a name?”

“Weaver.”

“You got a first name? Or are you, like, Bono or something?”

“Savannah. And I don’t know who that is.”

“He was a—you know what, never mind. I’m Reese. Nice to meet you, Weaver.” He pauses in his sawing and basically shoves his hand in her face. The younger one stops, too, and watches with amusement.

She sighs. Apparently this conversation needs to be had, so she shakes his hand and parrots, “You got a first name? Or was that it?”

“Derek. That’s my little brother, Kyle,” he adds with a nod toward Kyle, who makes a noise of protest at being called “little.”

“Nice to meet you, too, Derek and Kyle. Can we get back to this?”

“What’s your rush?”

Savannah sighs again, this time with obvious exasperation. “I’m supposed to be teaching a boatload of tunnel rats how to shoot whatever’s available inside of two hours from now, and I can’t do that if they don’t have anything to shoot with. So either help me or fuck off. Please.”

Kyle perks up at her comment, though. “Do you need help?”

“Yeah, that was kind of my—”

“No, I mean with teaching. We’re as tunnel-rat as they come, and we know what we’re doing.”

That catches her attention.  “Define knowing what you’re doing.”

“How do you think we’ve lived this long?” Derek retorts. He’s smiling, which she finds a little unnerving, and his tone isn’t so much challenging her as it is bragging. “We were part of the J-Day group under City Hall, and everyone knows we wouldn’t have made it to the tunnels if _we_ hadn’t come out shooting.”

“Is that supposed to impress me?”

Kyle rolls his eyes and elbows his brother. “We used to go skeet-shooting with our dad all the time. Before J-Day, anyway. Derek was a varsity wrestler in high school, and we both took karate lessons when we were little and did riflery at camp. We aren’t as experienced as some of those military guys, or the brass, but we’ve been living down here almost as long as anyone who wasn’t in one of the official bunkers. And we did make it out of City Hall, too. So we do know what we’re doing.”

Savannah nods. “Sure, then. Show me what you can do. That’s what’ll impress me. And you can start with helping me get this damn thing open.”

***

Almost fifty kids, ranging in age from about five to fifteen, show up, so Savannah admits, only a little grudgingly, that she’s thankful for the help. It turns out that they really do know what they’re doing: Derek is as skilled with firearms as almost anyone she knows and surprisingly good at explaining how, and Kyle is precise and gentle enough to get through to even the quartet of six-year-olds. 

She invites them back for the next day’s session as nicely as she can, and Derek’s eyes twinkle when he says, “Wouldn’t miss it.” Kyle elbows him again.

She’s not completely clueless; she can tell Derek’s flirting with her—or trying—but while she’s not especially nervous around boys, she’s also not schooled in any of the ways she’s supposed to respond. Not to mention they’re at war, and she’s not particularly interested in distractions. Personal entanglements are fine, but the mission comes first.

She makes a mental note to repeat that thought to Sarah next time she suggests again that Savannah make an effort to have friends besides Lauren, who Sarah says doesn’t count.

So she shrugs and says, “Great, thanks,” and turns to take the now-empty crate to where it will be useful.  That’s when Derek asks, in all seriousness, “Why are you so angry? I thought that went pretty well. But you’ve been pissy since we showed up—to _help_ , remember—and I’m not really sure what we did to offend you.”

Savannah also never managed to learn Sarah’s ability, borne from years of waitressing, to put on a fake smile and play nice.  Mostly she just gets annoyed, and it shows. She rubs her forehead wearily and admits, “Sorry. It’s not really about you. It’s just—there were fifty kids in here who hardly knew which end of the gun to hold, and if it weren’t for me volunteering and two perfectly good soldiers wandering around with nothing to do today, they still wouldn’t know. There’s no fucking organization in this place, we’re running out of tunnel space fast, and sooner or later the combination is going to get people killed.”

“Organization?” Derek asks. “We’re fighting a war, not pushing paper.”

The knowledge that she should try to be friendly is at direct odds with her instinctual response, so Savannah makes herself take a deep breath before replying, “We’re not fighting a war. We’re surviving one, at best. We have a patchwork network of tunnels stuffed with a population that might be 600, or 400, or over a thousand. And those are just the ones we’re aware of. People are getting whatever food they can, whatever training somebody nearby can teach them, and whatever supplies they can take from the main stashes and figure out how to use. We need a census, and we need an inventory, and we need some kind of rationing system and a way to keep the tunnels habitable, or we’re going to start dying out well before Skynet figures out where we’re hiding.”

Derek blinks. “That’s actually a pretty good point. But we figure the brass has their reasons, right? I mean, more people are popping up and dying off every day. And if there are really a thousand people just in the tunnels here…that’s a lot of bodies to keep track of.”

“We have to start somewhere. And they don’t have their reasons—everybody thinks it’s a perfectly good point, but we’re all so busy trying to survive and make sure everyone else does that no one’s taking the time to help me make it happen.”

“You sound like you’ve actually discussed this with the brass,” Kyle comments.

She cocks her head; they hadn’t recognized her name earlier? “Well, yeah, I’ve been helping to plan this shit since I was eight, so…the whole thing with having a group of people in charge makes sense, but it keeps making it so we can’t actually make that much progress. Decisions by committee and all.”

Both brothers stare at her with renewed curiosity. “Who are you, exactly?” Derek finally asks.

“Savannah Weaver, I told you.”

“But, I mean—since you were _eight_? Were your parents part of the planning before J-Day, too?”

“My parents were killed in a helicopter crash when I was little. But Sarah—Sarah Connor—she raised me, so we pretty much _were_ the planning until the last couple of years before J-Day.”

Derek looks reasonably impressed, but Kyle looks downright gobsmacked. “ _You’re_ Sarah Connor’s daughter? I thought your name sounded familiar, but I didn’t think…wow, that’s—”

It’s Derek’s turn to elbow his brother. “Sorry, Kyle’s got a major case of hero worship for most of the planners. And especially her. No offense.”

“None taken…?”

“It’s just,” Kyle attempted to explain. “The stories everyone tells, like she got visited by time travelers and fought metal that hasn’t even been built yet? And then nobody believed her but she made all this happen anyway? I guess you’d be used to that, but…I don’t know, I think she sounds pretty amazing. I mean, I know it was a group effort, like you said, but she’s the one everyone’d talk about down in the tunnels, especially early on when nobody knew what was happening, really. They all call her Saint Sarah.”

“Seriously? She’s not, like, a superhero, you know. She’s just…I don’t know, she’s just Sarah.”

Kyle doesn’t look any less dazed as Derek steers him away, with a promise to see her tomorrow with whatever tunnel rats they can recruit.

***

She finds Sarah back in the dug-out niche they had claimed for themselves as soon as it became clear that tunnel life was going to last for a while. Sarah likes her privacy, Savannah likes her breathing room, and they’re both happier not bunking down in the massive makeshift barracks that most people sleep in. The choice has lent a bit of extra mystique to Sarah, at least, since they’re effectively removed from having to make small talk most of the time and from fraternizing with the tunnel rats and refugees who are already a little in awe of her, like Kyle.

It’s not totally clear to Savannah how Sarah’s become a real-life legend so quickly. She has nothing but respect for her adoptive mother’s singlehanded drive to save humanity, and certainly most of the tunnel community (including Savannah herself) wouldn’t be here without her. But as she had told Kyle, Sarah is just Sarah. She’s not a religious figure or a wizard or even a particularly friendly person most of the time. Not that Savannah’s much warmer.

Sarah looks up from untying her boots and nods toward a covered wooden bowl by the curtained entrance. “Hey. There’s chili from Mira, if you want any. It’s not bad. No meat, but the canned veggies held up.”

Savannah sets her weapons down, shucks her own boots, and flops on her sleeping mat. “In a sec. Geez, you should’ve told me how exhausting it is teaching a bunch of ten-year-olds how to pull a trigger.”

“In fairness, I only had one of you at the time. And you knew what you were doing well before you were ten, anyway. Why did you volunteer to lead a whole training thing? You’ve been dreading it for days since Reynolds suggested that someone should, and now…”

“Ugh, yeah, I know. But someone had to. And at least I had some help today.”

“Oh?” Sarah starts spooning chili into a mug. “Who?”

“Couple of tunnels rats—brothers. They seemed okay, knew what they were doing. Said they’d come back tomorrow, so I guess that’s something.”

“Look at you, making friends.”

“I mean, maybe. I just don’t get why it all has to be so haphazard—they just walked up while I was unloading one of the weapons crates and offered.”

“That’s bad?”

“That means there were two perfectly capable soldiers just wandering around with nothing to do, and if someone would just help me…”

Sarah rolls her eyes and, through a mouthful of tomato sauce, groans, “Baby girl, we’ve been over this. And over and over.”

“You agree with me! So does—”

“I know. But we’ve got enough on our plate just keeping things going. Just finding enough fighters to bring supplies back from the bunkers is hard enough. You know that.”

“I just need Marty or someone to back me up! I could find a few people who _aren’t_ in the brass to help, and we could…”

“…make people wonder why you’re taking a census in the middle of the apocalypse?”

“You know that’s not what—”

“And _you_ know you can’t just snap your fingers and have people agree with you.”

“Is this about making friends again? Because I thought I did okay today with Derek and Kyle…I mean, he said I was being kinda pissy, but then we talked and it seemed all right…Sarah?”

Sarah is staring at her, her spoon frozen in mid-gesture. “Who?”

“Derek and Kyle. Reese. They’re the ones who helped me out today.”

“Oh.”

“If you’re going to give me an awkward talk about, like, sex stuff again, I can just go find Lauren…”

“Oh, don’t be cheeky. I was just surprised.”

“They’re just boys, not aliens. It doesn’t really matter _who’s_ helping as long as _someone_ is, right?”

“Right, yeah…” Sarah paused thoughtfully, tapping her spoon against her cheek. “You know…come to think of it, I might have an idea for you.”

“Yeah?”

“A couple of the time travelers I met in ’08 or so talked about Serrano Point. It’s a nuclear plant, or it was…actually, a subsidiary of Zeira Corp owned it, but I think Ellison shut it down after he took over the company.”

“Why do we care about a building that’s probably irradiated and that Skynet might’ve already flattened?”

“Well, it wouldn’t be that hard to find out if it’s still standing. It wasn’t irradiated when I worked there—Cameron and I were janitors for, like, a week to see what was going on. The place was on our list—and they made it sound like taking it was a major turning point in the war. We’re almost a decade early, I think, but if it’s viable and if we could establish it as a base or whatever before Skynet gets any more geared up…”

Savannah’s stomach rumbles, and she grabs what’s left of the chili. “A real base would be amazing…but I still don’t get what that has to do with my whole census thing. Or what keeps Skynet from leveling the whole thing once we’re there.”

“Not sure about Skynet, but there are at least a couple of timelines where they _didn’t_ destroy it. Maybe they don’t know we’re there, or the plant is valuable to them, too. But if we could crack that part—it’d be a goal, at least. We give people something to work toward, to look forward to, then maybe they’ll hear you out when you say you need to know what their deal is to figure out who’s at the vanguard or guarding our rear or whatever else.”

“That’s…that could actually work. If we can solve the not-getting-flattened part.”

“Well, maybe we just need a lot of surface-to-air missiles. Or a rocket launcher. I’ve never used one of those. Could be fun.”

***

While Sarah debates whether and how to best pitch the Serrano Point push, and the rest of the brass focuses on keeping a chaotic population fed and healthy and safe, Savannah returns to training whoever needs training. Kyle and Derek almost always join her, and sometimes they bring other peers who are willing to help out, too. She’s reintroduced to Rachel Perriello, who had been in her and Sarah’s bunker on J-Day and by virtue of that has become something of a den mother to the younger tunnel rats, and meets Simon Saxon, who’s shyer than Sydney Fields but can literally assemble an assault rifle with his eyes closed.

It’s hard to tell whether she’s actually making friends, but at least her new acquaintances know what they’re doing well enough to be useful. They all listen to her, too—even Derek, who at twenty-three is older than the rest by at least a couple of years—and after some initial misgivings, particularly with Rachel, they seem less intimidated by her reputation (and, of course, Sarah’s by association) and tolerate her as an individual.

Adults start popping up at the sessions alongside a steady stream of younger would-be soldiers, and Savannah is repeatedly boggled by the sheer number of people who have managed to hang onto life in spite of minimal survival skills. As more people start to show up—irregularly, to be sure, but there are definitely more of them with each passing week—Savannah starts sectioning off groups by age and skill level, and then adds “courses” in whatever someone can teach, ranging from wilderness survival to structural engineering.

Everything seems to spread by word of mouth, which drives her a little crazy. It’s impossible to get a useful headcount, as there’s no real consistency with attendance and the sessions take place at an increasingly varied range of times and locations. She does her best to keep track of everything, but what had started as a one-off job no one wanted has quickly snowballed into something useful, if frequently chaotic, and she knows better than to try to cut off something that’s working just because it isn’t up to her standards. She can at least start to track some of the regulars, though, and in the meantime, just having something to organize feels productive.

She ends up as the default arbiter and central source for accurate information, even if she’s not teaching most of the classes. No one so much as pauses at the fact that she’s not yet eighteen; whether it’s her height (five-foot-eight and, according to Sarah, still growing), affiliations with the others in charge, or her sheer competence combined with a no-bullshit attitude is unclear. But she’s comforted by the knowledge that at least one cog in greater machine of the human resistance is turning the way she envisioned.

By the time her birthday actually rolls around, nearly eight months after the initial lesson, Sarah comments that, in spite of themselves, they might actually have the makings of an army.


	2. 2019

** 2019 **

Savannah’s eighteenth birthday present is a far cry from the stuffed animals of her youth or the practical tools Sarah had always given her, but she can’t come up with anything she wants more than the support to figure out who they’re trying to protect, and Sarah delivers.

She’s pitched the Serrano Point idea to the dozen or so people who count as “the brass”—the acknowledged leaders of their unwieldy tunnel-bound tribe—over the course of several months, with the caveats that the idea had originated in other, very different timelines and that she honestly can’t figure out why Skynet wouldn’t make use of an air force against them. She brings it up again, and this time adds that they couldn’t have made such a big move a couple of years ago, but they’re starting to look ready now.

That’s when Jorge Cortes, who’s more or less in charge of intelligence, points out that Skynet doesn’t actually know they’re there. “As far as my guys can gather, it seems like they think they’ve won. We haven’t been telling anyone because God forbid we blow our cover accidentally, but we’ve done a shockingly good job of staying hidden.”

“So they wouldn’t expect us to pop out of the ground, let alone occupy a pretty sizeable building,” says Roxy Jennings, who keeps track of non-weapons inventory.

“It sounds like getting in wouldn’t be the problem—it’d be staying and either not getting noticed or effectively defending a ‘pretty sizeable building,’” Marty Bedell replies.

No one questions that the decision will come down to him and Sarah—she tends to direct the big-picture ideas whereas he handles more of the day-to-day command, and both matter here. Marty is young—not even twenty-six, but he’s been leading the remnants of humanity since they came out of their J-Day safehouses. His military background and natural geniality make him a natural commander in a way that even Sarah isn’t, and sometimes Savannah thinks he’s becoming who John Connor was supposed to, albeit without the legend. People respect him as a leader, but he and everyone else who counts as brass have gone out of their way not to be revered. Sarah seems to be the only one who didn’t quite succeed in that, with her explanations of time-travelers sent to help her and her knack for scaring people into surviving despite themselves.

“I think it’s worth it,” Sarah reaffirms. “It’s a decommissioned nuclear power plant. So it’s pretty well-insulated and secure, assuming the structure itself hasn’t gone too much to shit in the last decade or so—”

“And if has, we can fix it,” chimes in Rose Reynolds, who had worked for the Army Corps of engineers before J-Day and oversees the variable structural soundness of their subterranean environment along with whomever she can recruit.

“—so if we limit unnatural light and keeps signs of our residence to a minimum, it’s possible they won’t be able to tell, even if they’re scanning it for heat signatures or something.”

“We could use the space,” Savannah adds. She’s usually considered as an extension of Sarah in these meetings, and is here mostly by virtue of being her daughter and more competent than most people under the age of twenty. But she has more and more of a perspective of her own these days, what with her makeshift school, and she almost definitely sees more of the general population than most as a result. “We barely have room for all the trainings we’re doing as is, and I have yet to meet someone who’s got room to roll over or take a shit without hitting someone else. If we could connect, like, the basement or at least the lower levels of the plant to the tunnels…we’d also have an evacuation route, if we really needed it. And access to water. And some height to survey more of the landscape from. And—”

“I’m in,” says Ray Rodriguez, who’s been Marty’s right hand since before J-Day. The others all start to nod—Shang Xin and Owen Jones in tech, Alyssa Bedell for food stocks, Travis Marcus and Liz Grey with weapons inventory, and Justin Perry, who’s with Ray and Marty on strategy. Marty surveys the room and its eclectic range of ages and experiences and expertise for almost a minute before nodding, too.

“Okay, so, I guess we’re doing this. But we’re going to do it well.”

It takes hours to even begin to hash out details, but they agree that they need to thoroughly scout out and tunnel to the site, determine how best to take it over and inhabit the place, and then either fly under Skynet’s radar or deflect the machines’ attacks—most likely both. No one wants to half-ass such a risky venture, and Sarah in particular insists that they plan for as much as they possibly can before putting lives on the line or exposing themselves.

Savannah points out that they need to know just how many people they’re supposed to account for to do any of this with the precision they’re talking about—and just like that, she’s got her census.

***

It’s quick work to recruit Derek, who wants to be useful but prefers not to be around little kids, and Rachel, who seems to know everyone, to help her take stock of their population. They start with the now-hundreds who stream in and out of makeshift classrooms every day and work their way outwards, gathering various other helpers as their reach extends. It’s slow work to interview everyone and to log information on their health, skills, and needed training—by hand, on whatever paper they can find—but it gets done.

Almost every day, someone marvels at her squad’s ability to keep track of details on what they find is upwards of 700 people. And, section by section, she hands information off to the brass, who in turn establish designated dormitories, dining rooms, storage spaces, and classrooms. Rose’s engineers and builders can actually account for numbers and usage factors as they refine each tunnel. Roxy’s, Alyssa’s, and Travis and Liz’s teams can actually better distribute and keep track of their still-painfully limited supplies. Everything is still rough and rudimentary at best, and there are never enough rations, but for people who have lived underground for so long, the mere formality of it all means hope and direction.

By midsummer, Savannah’s team has expanded to eight, and the population has carefully expanded from central Los Angeles all the way to the Eagle Rock bunker that she and Sarah had set up back in 2011 or so. It now houses the especially young, old, and infirm survivors. It’s the farthest point from the heart of the tunnel system where most people (the brass included) are concentrated.

Sydney Fields, at the ripe age of eleven, has ended up in charge there for most intents and purposes: she’s smart, capable, and apparently learned from an unwitting Savannah how to shape people and time into something useful. She’s quiet, but, unlike Savannah, she’s caring and sweet and more interested in other people; as a result, the younger kids adore her and the adults respect her.

Lauren moves out there, too, which Savannah tries not to take too hard; the older girl has been her only real friend for years, but she does need to be with her sister, and Savannah needs to be near Sarah. Either way, Lauren’s often back downtown to lead medical trainings and to let Helena Hayes, who has more patience and experience with pediatrics, handle Eagle Rock.

***

Sarah conjures up a package of chocolate icing and a small bag of pretzels, and they toast to her success on what is technically Savannah’s eighteenth-and-a-half birthday—and the next chapter in the fight against Skynet.

Savannah keeps four of the people from her squad—known these days as Admin—Rachel and three others that she had deputized. The quartet spreads out to channel information to and from Savannah, who figures out rosters by hand. They then post schedules, answer questions and bring back updates on deaths, births, new refugees, and so on. The five of them become the de facto knowledge base of the entire tunnel system, simply because they know more or less where and who everyone is. They reunite two families that autumn—people who had been unknowingly stranded in different parts of the network—and integrate the odd survivor who stumbles toward them from the countryside.

Skynet still seems unaware of (or at least unthreatened by) the underground masses, so they haven’t had to contend with metal trying to pass for human yet, but Sarah insists on trained dogs wherever they can place them and ensures every newcomer gets a once-over. Ginger, whom Savannah had trained from her puppy days, has long since been recruited for training and deployment purposes by a veterinarian named Kate Brewster. She had been spayed, but plenty of other dogs that turn up are plenty fertile, and nowadays Kate and Ginger lead a small pack of mutts that know to bark at machinery, play nice with people, and attack almost anything on command.

Now that the would-be commanders actually know who they have to command, the brass starts planning for Serrano Point. Savannah’s in the loop and it’s understood that she’ll be at Sarah’s side at the vanguard when the time comes, but she knows where her strengths are, and leaves battle planning to Marty, Ray, Justin, and the others with actual military backgrounds. That isn’t to say she has any downtime—keeping tabs on hundreds of people is a full-time job, and she still leads various trainings and works to keep herself in shape.

Most people (regardless of age) still don’t really know what to make of Savannah, but as the initial craze of census-taking settles down, Rachel makes Savannah’s socialization a project of sorts. The other girl is, in her own way, just as determined as Savannah, and with some extra prodding from Sarah, Savannah ends up getting regularly dragged to wherever the older teenagers and younger twentysomethings congregate on a given evening. Most of the time she hovers as close to the entryway as she can get away with, reviewing rosters in her head and escaping back to Sarah after a couple hours, but occasionally someone starts talking to her.

It turns out Savannah’s hair, even more than her personal history and leadership role, is the most fascinating thing about her to a good chunk of the people she meets. Most of them—male and female alike—have short cuts like Sarah’s always preferred, or even shaved heads. Savannah isn’t the only exception, but with a thick orange braid that hangs to her waist, she stands out more than most.

She gets drawn into a game of Truth Or Dare one night, and ends up being dared to let her hair hang loose for the rest of the night, which almost turns into a free-for-all for most of the other girls (and a couple of the boys), who are oddly desperate in their shared desire to play with and style her hair. Savannah concludes once and for all that she’s simply missed the window for being (or understanding) a normal teenager, but she rolls her eyes and lets them do it.

(The alternative to the dare had been admitting details of her first kiss, which, of course, hasn’t actually happened yet. Just because she has nothing to be embarrassed about doesn’t mean a gaggle of kids need to know the details, or lack thereof.)

Of course, throwing a bunch of largely unsupervised adolescents into close quarters quickly devolves into a fair amount of sexual activity. Savannah hasn’t been part of any of that—sleeping elsewhere and her default frown make a big difference—but she’s aware that someone would probably volunteer if she showed any interest. That has less to do with any false self-impressions of her own allure or whatever, and more to do with the fact that there are a _lot_ of hormones going around, and not even she can keep track of the rapid changes among established partners, which seem to get shaken up on an almost hourly basis.

She thinks she _could_ be interested, if she got the right offer from someone who caught her in a good mood, but she doesn’t have the least clue of how to initiate anything the way most of the other girls-who-like-boys seem to. Or how to respond appropriately, if someone were to proposition her. She debates asking Sarah, who hadn’t made her history of sexual manipulation a secret to her daughter, but Savannah isn’t quite sure how to phrase what she wants to know. It’s a frustrating mental place to be, especially when she’s used to just knowing what her next move is.

It doesn’t help that she’s fairly sure Derek Reese has his eye on her somehow. He hasn’t suggested anything, but his cheeky and vaguely flirtatious comments never quite subside, no matter how often she had simply brushed past them in the course of working together on training and the census. He’s doing a lot of ops work nowadays, which mostly amounts to supply runs to untapped bunkers and abandoned-but-not-destroyed parts of southern California, while the intel and building teams are working toward Serrano Point, but he frequently shows up to help with the trainings Savannah leads, often with Kyle in tow, or to update someone’s records.

She can feel him watching her steadily in quiet moments, and she knows he was one of the people who wouldn’t stop staring at her unbound hair that time, even if he wasn’t one of the ones to actually touch it. She’d caught herself wondering briefly what would happen if he did. Savannah remembers telling him that competence was what impressed her, and whether or not he’d taken the comment to heart, he’s definitely proved himself, even among a growing army of skilled young soldiers. And he’s not bad to look at either.

The attention, such as it is, is flattering, Savannah decides, and if she’s trying to forge something resembling personal relationships with people who aren’t Sarah or Lauren, well, then, he’s as good a person to start with as any. On the other hand, she has more than enough other things on her mind, and Sarah doesn’t need to be bothered with untangling her superficial mental wanderings, so Savannah continues to ignore the matter.

Still, when Derek sprains his wrist that winter and offers to help with Admin while it heals, she slots him into her schedule pretty neatly and tries not to think about it too hard.


	3. 2020

** 2020 **

Savannah turns nineteen at what turns out to be the height of flu season. If Sarah so much as sniffles, no one sees it, but Savannah gets hit as hard as some of Sydney’s little brood with muscle aches and a deep, hacking cough. It’s the first time in four and a half years—since just after Judgment Day—that her body has had anything resembling a break, though, and it responds by sleeping more than she had ever thought possible.

Sarah plays nurse with a great deal of amusement and assures her that Rachel and the others have things well in hand. Savannah’s less worried about that and more concerned she’ll go stir-crazy in quasi-quarantine, but the virus lays her low for a solid week.

Between the medics and supply runs, they cobble together enough equipment and treatment supplies to quell the epidemic, and eventually Sarah manages to arrange for some visitors while she’s off with the rest of the brass somewhere. Rachel talks her ear off with gossip on who’s gotten sick and the alleged trails of infection—Savannah can’t really bring herself to care, but the company is nice—and Simon and Kyle come by with a hot water bottle that she can heat up on their little camp stove to relieve the aches.

Derek shows up, too, and tells her what she really wants to know—where the weaknesses are in the whole organizational system without her (there are several, none of them detrimental), what the general population thinks of the increasing investigation of the Serrano Point site (very highly), how the flu issue is impacting the Resistance’s operations (no serious setbacks).

He stays nearly an hour to answer her scratchy-voiced questions before he has to leave for sentry duty. Pausing by the curtain that separates her and Sarah’s niche from the rest of the world, he asks, “Is this where you always sleep? Why don’t you ever crash with the rest of us? We—well, you’d have more space, and no…parents.”

The word choice is a little interesting coming from someone who was orphaned on Judgment Day and then raised his little brother, but he says it with a note of hopefulness, like he thinks she’d say yes and leave Sarah by herself. A coughing fit spares Savannah from having to respond immediately. When she catches her breath again, she shakes her head. “We’ve got enough room here—it’s just the two of us. And Sarah’s not…she’s not, like keeping me here. I like it.”

“She’s basically your mom, though, right?”

“Well, yeah…”

“So at some point, you’ll want to, like, do your own thing.”

“What? What else would I be doing?” They haven’t been apart for more than a handful of hours at a time since Savannah was eight years old. She had promised after Judgment Day to stay close to Sarah, literally and otherwise, and she keeps her promises.

“I don’t know. I guess you’re lucky to still have a mom. Hope you feel better—I’ll try to come by again later, if you’re not too busy,” he adds with a wink and no apparent hard feelings.

She mentions the exchange to Sarah later as she’s tucking Savannah in like she’s a little kid. “You should think about it, you know. You don’t _have_ to bunk down with me if you’d rather—”

“I wouldn’t rather! I’m with you. You know that.”

Sarah drops a kiss on her forehead, lips cool against Savannah’s forehead. “I appreciate it, baby girl. But…”

“Hey, I’ve made some friends. Some of the girls came by earlier, and Simon and Kyle brought the hot pack thing.”

“…Kyle?”

“Reese. Derek’s brother. He’s almost my age—you should meet him at some point.”

“Oh?”

“He’s the one with the case of hero worship for you. It’d probably make the crap out of his day.”

Sarah gets a funny look on her face and shakes her head. “I don’t have any interest in meeting any hero worshippers. Send him back when he’s older and knows better.”

Savannah is a little annoyed that her body could possibly need more sleep, and yet her eyelids are already drooping again. “…’n what about Derek?”

“What about Derek?”

“I don’t know. I think he wanted a different answer. Although I’m sticking with mine…”

“Get some sleep, baby girl.”

***

By spring, an ops team actually makes it inside Serrano Point, and they report back the following: it’s a massive building that could be a game-changer for their living conditions; it can continue to shield them from Skynet with the right precautions; it had been built to be largely earthquake- and bomb-resistant; and it’s a horrific, possibly bio-hazardous, structurally questionable mess after over a decade of abandonment.

But hope, as Alyssa Bedell points out, is a thing with wings, and official secrets are functionally nonexistent in the tunnels, so just about everyone knows within days that their prize is an actual, realistic possibility—if they can figure out how to get it clean and fixed up, anyway. It hadn’t occurred to anyone to stock up on cleaning supplies for after Judgment Day, so the day-to-day mission becomes attempts to find or create those.

The raids take teams almost to the Yucca Valley. The tunnels don’t go that that far out, not nearly, but plenty of soldiers are more than willing disregard the risks in favor of time aboveground, and Skynet is concentrated in what had been urban areas anyway. Still, Sarah goes stiff every time another team leaves, worried that by proposing what had been a key victory in another timeline, she’s somehow doomed this one.

But things keep progressing, and Savannah starts directing everyone she’s more or less in charge of toward the cleanup and rebuilding efforts. They lose more fighters than anyone would like—Skynet doesn’t ignore what people it does catch on the surface, and their medical capabilities are still rudimentary at best—but Serrano Point quietly becomes habitable in spurts.

Eventually, there’s a rotating skeleton crew in the building, and the only real question is how to migrate several hundred people into it more or less permanently. Do they rush everyone in at once and risk chaos? Do they increase the building’s population bit by bit, minimizing the risk of attracting Skynet’s attention but leaving it relatively unprotected if they do get noticed? Unfortunately, this becomes a major sticking point—no one, from the brass down to the youngest tunnel rats, can seem to agree on an answer.

***

After another fruitless discussion—not helped by the July heat—Savannah leaves the brass’s meeting room ready to punch through a wall, because she doesn’t know what the answer should be, either. Marty catches her arm on the way out and pulls her aside, away from the general flow of traffic.

“Got a sec?”

She nods, and he continues.

“Look, you’ve been right about all the organizational shit since you were doing chore wheels back at that lighthouse. You know that; I’m not afraid to admit it. That census and all your scheduling has made a crazy difference for everybody.”

He says it so matter-of-factly that Savannah almost doesn’t realize it’s meant as a compliment. “Thanks?”

“I’m not trying to flatter you—it’s a fact. And I was wondering if you could do me a favor with that robot-brain of yours.”

Savannah’s head jerks back at the description, and her aversion must show on her face because Marty amends, “I just mean—you’re good at what you do. Really good. And I know you’re used to just _knowing_ answers, or what to do—no internal monologue needed—so I’m figuring you’re as frustrated as I am here.”

“What does my ‘robot-brain’ have to do with this?” she asks, bristling.

Marty shrugs. “Organize it. Tell me how we should be running that place and how you’d set that up. Then I’ll know how to staff it. You’ve been right so far; show me what you can really do.”           

She blinks. “You’re serious?”

“Yep. And—look, I know you and Sarah like to stay close, but…when we _do_ get there and we’re all settled in, I’d want you doing this full-time. Not just haphazardly with whoever will participate—you’d be in charge of personnel, everywhere. Keep track of our people and where they are, make sure everyone’s sleeping and eating and doing their share of sentry duty and crap. And you can personally throttle anyone who says you’re doing the easy work by staying local. Scout’s honor.”

“And Sarah?”

“She’d still be doing her thing, which is to say…everything.”

“I’ll think about it,” Savannah says, turning to go. “I mean, I’ll do the invasion thing, but the rest…”

“You’ll do it,” he says from behind her. “You’ve been perfecting the art since you were, what, twelve? And when no one was even asking for it. Come find me when you’re ready.”

***

He’s right. She does. Two weeks later, there’s a plan in motion for a full-scale invasion of Serrano Point.

Savannah has detailed personnel schedules for the first few weeks of occupation but isn’t instrumental in planning the invasion itself. It’s not an overly complicated plan—mostly, they just rush into the building and start ferrying up supplies—but the number of contingencies that need preparing for is impressive. She’s at the front of the push with Sarah, where she belongs.

The night before the invasion reminds her of their last night in the bunker after Judgment Day, curled up side by side and waiting for the next iteration of their life to start. They’ve concluded that doing it in daylight is the best—Skynet would have a big visual advantage over them at night—but if they can continue to go largely unnoticed, the timing won’t matter.

“You feel ready for tomorrow?” Sarah asks.

“Yeah. It’s been a while since we’ve seen any real action.”

Sarah shudders. “Don’t jinx it.”

“Are you? Ready, I mean.”

“As much as ever. I just…oh, it could just all come crashing down at any second. Being aboveground probably won’t help with that, either. Keeps me up at night.”

“Not like you sleep that much anyway.”

“I guess,” Sarah murmurs, and they slip into a companionable silence. Savannah’s sure Sarah has actually fallen asleep after a few minutes until she whispers, “Baby girl? You still awake?”

“Mmhm.”

“You’ve seen the building plans, right? You know there’ll be barracks and things for everybody.”

“Uh huh—oh. Sarah…”

“You should. I’m not going to make you do anything you don’t want to, but you should. You’re gonna be twenty in a few months, and you can’t just live with your mom forever. I mean, I guess you _can_ , but even the kids who weren’t orphaned on J-Day seem to all group together. At some point…”

Savannah blows a raspberry. “What happened to wanting to keep me close?”

“I think we can manage even if we’re sleeping in different places. And if you’re going to be orchestrating everyone, you’ll probably know where to find me most of the time.”

“…you know about that? What Marty asked me?”

“Hm? Oh, I just figured you would. You’re good at it. If it takes you off the battlefield…honestly, you’re probably safer in the building anyway.”

“Safe isn’t useful,” Savannah says. “It’s just safe.”

“Well, if you’re being useful, it doesn’t really matter where you’re doing it. Baby girl, most people couldn’t manage a fifth of what you can do—on any front. Really. But they can learn how to shoot and all that crap. Your mind just seems to work that way, and that’s not something you can just teach.”

“Marty said something like that when he offered me the…job or whatever.”

“Well, he was right. Hey, if it works out tomorrow…it’s going to be a whole new thing for us. Might as well embrace it, right?”

Savannah raises an eyebrow, even though Sarah can’t see it. “Aren’t you pretty much going to be doing the same stuff you always do? Run the show, have the vision, make the little kids want to grow up to be you?”

“I don’t know about the last part, but…well, you should include me in your charts and everything, anyway. None of us should be above the grunt work if we’re needed, you know?”

“That’s very humble of you, Saint Sarah.”

“What?”

“That’s what they call you in the tunnels. Mostly as a compliment. You’re pretty good at the selfless encouraging-other-people-to-do-what’s-good-for-them thing.”

She sighs into the darkness. “It’s the only thing I know, baby girl.”

***

The most unexpected piece of the invasion is that it goes off without a hitch. There are no traps in the building—Skynet-created, structural, mold-related, or otherwise. The place still smells like industrial cleaning supplies, the solar- and hydro-powered generators that the engineers have ginned up from parts keep the place well-lit, and they even have running water, albeit limited. The “civilians” stay in the tunnels, which will still be safer and more easily defensible, so Serrano Point is filled with active soldiers, and they know how to follow orders.

The result is structured chaos until things shake out into the agreed-upon order; Savannah hardly sleeps the first week there because she’s running around finding the best places to disseminate information, setting up some basic spaces for her team to operate out of, and channeling what seems like a still-growing sea of people into their places. She doesn’t even test out her sleeping mat in the barracks until three days in, at which point she falls asleep so quickly that the absence of Sarah’s breathing hardly makes a difference.

Three weeks in, it’s like someone has flipped a switch, and suddenly everything seems to be working. A rumor spreads about a massive alcohol cache someone turned up, which turns into an impromptu celebration of their success in one of the big rooms in the basement. Savannah gets goaded into going by Rachel, as usual, and Sarah’s nowhere to be seen, but the general mood once they arrive is so elevated that she finds herself surprisingly cheerful and even willingly interacts with a few people she recognizes.

Kyle turns up at her side about forty minutes in with a grin on his face. “Can you believe we’re here? It’s been almost three years since you were yelling at me and Derek about what a mess everything was, and now…”

She has to grin at that. “It is pretty cool. Where, uh, where is he, anyway?”

Kyle shrugs. “Somewhere around here—he was looking for you, actually, but I’m not sure where he went. Is Sarah here?”

“She’s in the building somewhere, probably, but…this isn’t really her kind of thing.”

“Or yours?”

“Or mine, but people keep making me go. And she keeps telling me I should hang out with people my own age more, so…I don’t know, this is kind of fun, though.”

Kyle nods and then points across the crowded room to Derek, who spots them with a grin and waves. Savannah barely has time turn around before he’s right in front of her, his extra three inches of height suddenly seeming like miles, a huge smile on his face. Kyle disappears into the crowd as if on cue.

“I see you survived the big invasion.”

“You, too,” she swallows. Has he ever stood _this_ close to her before?

“Good to know,” he says, and kisses her.

Savannah feels her whole body go stiff with surprise, but she’s not designed to stand there paralyzed, not with fear or anything else. She throws her arms around his neck and presses into him. It seems like the right thing to do, anyway, so she does it.

The seconds stretch out like stars passed at lightspeed, and even if she’s going on pure instinct, without the training or conditioning she can usually rely on, Savannah very quickly appreciates what all the damn fuss is about.

Someone starts whooping, and after a few more breaths she and Derek break apart. She laughs helplessly in his embrace, and he grins. “Wanna get out of here?”

Without hesitation, she nods, and the cheers follow them into the hallway and partway up the stairwell.

***

“I think I’m sleeping with Derek Reese,” she tells Sarah a week or so later over a shared bowl of canned beans and one of Alyssa’s less-successful attempts at bread-making.

Sarah pauses, still hunched over her food, and tilts her head up to stare for several seconds in what mostly looks like surprise. “You… _think_? Usually, you pretty much are or you aren’t.”

“I mean…I am.”

“When did…?”

“Not that long ago—like, really, just a few days. I haven’t seen that much of you, and since I don’t actually know where you’re bunking down when not on duty…”

“Eh, still trying to find somewhere permanent. Aren’t you glad I made you go bed down elsewhere, though?”

“You’re not mad? Or, I don’t know…about to be really protective or something?”

“Is he treating you right?”

“Well…yeah.”

“Is he making you do anything you don’t want to?”

“No! I mean—I’d break him if he tried. Remember that creep when I was fifteen?” A year or so after Judgment Day, a sixty-something man with a crooked grin had tried to grope her, thinking Sarah’s absence was permission enough. Savannah had dislocated his shoulder and broken his nose without blinking an eye. The brass instituted a zero-tolerance sexual harassment policy within days, and the punishment of unarmed surface-level guard duty was enough to prevent most problems. Rose said it was better than the Army, anyway.

“Good. And you’re being careful?”

“Yeah, of course.” She hadn’t quite understood why everyone had been so uniformly committed to stocking up on condoms along with food and whatever else had made it into their caches at the time, but it definitely makes more sense now.

“Then why would I be…anything? I mean, he’s a decent guy, right, so if you’re happy…”

“Yeah, I am. It’s—it’s different. But good. You should meet him at some point, probably.”

Sarah nods a little absently, suddenly very intent on her lunch. “Sure thing, baby girl.”


	4. 2021

** 2021 **

One of the downsides of barracks-style sleeping quarters—even co-ed ones—is an utter lack of privacy. It ends up not mattering in most cases; most people have long since learned to meet situational nudity with nonchalance and to respect each other’s limited personal space. Even quasi-public sex becomes commonplace, to a certain extent—humans tend to be far hornier than they are modest, and anyone who’s slept in the communal spaces has likely endured the awkward process of trying to fall asleep next to a tangle of limbs and quiet (or not) moaning.

Savannah has been largely but by no means entirely spared this experience, thanks to her little niche with Sarah in the tunnels. Still, when she and Derek have overlapping free blocks, he respects her preference for finding somewhere out of the way, if not completely private. She has her first orgasm in a nonfunctioning elevator stuck on the basement level of Serrano Point and loses her virginity on the landing of a little-trafficked service stairwell.

She turns twenty with little fanfare, but Derek’s discovery of an apparently abandoned corridor on one of the uppermost levels is gift enough. They’re both topless and fumbling with each others’ belts when the unfortunately unmistakable sound of throat-clearing cuts into the moment. As she bends over to grab her tank top, Derek goes stiff, and his abrupt change in demeanor makes her jump. She whirls around, shirt clutched in front of her chest, and then sighs with relief.

“Oh, Sarah, it’s you.”

“Were you expecting someone else?” She raises an eyebrow, gaze focused on Derek.

“Nope, just,” Savannah maneuvers her shirt back on, “What are you doing back here?”

Sarah nods at a door a few yards away, near where she’s standing. “Janitors’ closet. Too small and too out of the way for storage purposes, but it’s big enough for me to sleep in. And pretty private…or at least I thought it was. You going to introduce us?”

“Oh, right,” Savannah had wanted them to meet, and while this maybe wasn’t the ideal scenario, that didn’t really matter. “Sarah, Derek Reese. Derek, this is Sarah Connor.” She twists around to look at him. “Probably don’t tell Kyle.”

He doesn’t even crack a smile, though she catches a fleeting telltale twitch on Sarah’s face. “Ma’am.”

“Nice to meet you, soldier,” she snorts. “I can’t figure out who’s been telling everyone to get so formal, but you can drop that. I don’t bite.”

“You absolutely do,” Savannah points out, amused. At least Sarah is being nice.

She chuckles, “Well, I won’t as long as I don’t keep getting ma’amed. Look, I’ll come back in…oh, half an hour? Do what you need to do, just try not to mention to anyone that I’m camping out here, ‘kay? The privacy’s nice.”

“Sure thing,” Savannah says while Derek just keeps standing there. As soon as Sarah’s ostensibly out of earshot, she rounds on him, “So, where were we?”

He’s staring in the direction Sarah had left in. “That’s your mom?”

“Well, adopted, but…yeah. I mean, you knew that—that was her being nice, you know.”

“I just thought she’d be taller,” he says, after a pause.

“Don’t tell me you’re going to go all…bug-eyed on me like your brother whenever I talk about her.”

That seems to snap him back into himself. “Hardly. Just…wasn’t expecting to meet the legendary whatever today.” When she rolls her eyes, he adds, “Hey, not all of us grew up right into the brass with the mother of all doomsday preppers as a parenting figure.”

“Okay, fine. Can we get back to—”

“Down girl! Yeah, sure, just…I think we’re going to have to find a different place first.”

***

He does tell Kyle about the encounter, though he does so while the three of them are eating together a few nights later so she can at least tease him about it. She’s fond of Kyle—he’s straight shooter, literally and otherwise, and likeably earnest without a shred of naïveté. He and Derek have each other the way she and Sarah do, or Lauren and Sydney—all different relationships, of course, but they’re each other’s only family.

Kyle laughs at Derek when Savannah recounts his seriousness, though Derek points out he probably would’ve done the same thing.

“Well, I wouldn’t have been feeling up Savannah—I mean, no offense.”

“None taken.”

“And anyway, now I have your bad example to learn from when I do meet her, Der.”

“Yeah, thanks for the support, man,” Derek mutters around his sandwich. “You know, she’s like half a head shorter than you are.”

“Really? I’d would’ve thought she’d be taller.”

“That’s what I said!”

“You’re, like, my height,” Kyle says to Savannah.

“Still not my biological mother. My birth parents were taller.” She tugs at a loose strand of red hair in indication.

“Oh, right, yeah.”

“Do you want to meet her at some point? I mean, she’s not really into being, like, stared at, but I could probably make something happen.”

Kyle shrugs. “Not yet.”

“Not…yet? What the hell, you’ve been crushing on her since age, like, fourteen,” Derek points out.

“Yeah, and now I’m almost twenty—”

“—you’re only going to be nineteen in a month and a half—”

“—and I don’t want to just, like, meet her and be acting like a stupid little kid. I want to meet her when I actually want to meet _her_ , you know, as a person. Legends aren’t…aren’t really people. Does that make sense?”

Savannah’s reminded of Sarah’s comment about being more open to meeting an older Kyle. “Yeah, I guess. Very…adult of you.”

He grins good-naturedly, though Derek looks concerned. “Yeah, well, five and a half years after J-Day, I have to’ve grown up at least a little, right? Regardless of what Big Brother here would have you think.” Derek elbows him, which he ignores in favor of stealing a slice of potato off of Derek’s plate, which quickly turns into a minor squabble.

“Yeah, real mature there, guys.”

***

The months in Serrano Point go by quickly, since each day is less of a battle to survive compared to the tunnels. Things get more predictable, for the most part, and while Savannah misses being in the field, she quickly realizes that predictable and boring are two very different animals.

For instance, Kyle actually does get to meet Sarah later that year, although Savannah has very little to do with it.

He volunteers to lead a last-minute ops team to retrieve a pregnant dog that had escaped the night before. The team radios back from the field that the mutt had given birth, so their return takes longer than scheduled, since the six of them now have to transport eight puppies and a very big, very anxious mother.

Savannah scrambles to find a few people who can meet them at the entrance on such short notice to help with the dogs and process their return. With minutes to spare, she ends up recruiting herself, Kate Brewster, and one of Kate’s newest dog handlers-in-training, a wide-eyed thirteen-year-old tunnel rat who introduces herself as Allison Young. They run into Sarah on the way, and she joins the welcome party.

The team arrives through one of the few operating ground-level entrances to Serrano Point that opens directly to the outside, rather than into the tunnels. They almost immediately set out unloading the infant puppies from the various pockets and slings in which they’ve been restrained, much to the relief of the mother dog, who goes from growling to docile in a matter of seconds. At least she’s too well-trained to bark outright at non-metal humanoids.

Kate and Allison ask Kyle a few quick questions about the dogs before going to check on the litter. While Kate explains to her trainee what they’re looking for, Sarah dismisses the team with a quick thank-you and turns to Kyle, who has so far done a good job of not staring at her. There’s a very pregnant pause, and Savannah feels oddly like she’s intruding on something private.

Finally, Sarah says, “Well done, Reese.”

“Thank you, m—uh…we were just following orders.”

“Well, you managed to improvise pretty well. We’ll have eight more guard dogs in a few months, since none of them died from exposure or God only knows what else. And you can call me by my name, jeez. Okay?”

“Okay…Sarah. Thanks, it’s—it’s nice of you to say so.”

She doesn’t roll her eyes like Savannah expects; instead, her mouth twitches with the ghost of a smile, and she says, “I’m not nice. Just stating facts.”

“Fair enough,” he says with a calm smile. “In any case, it’s—I’m glad to finally meet you. Sarah.”

***

In October, a massive group of soldiers go to follow up on rumors of livestock to the north, but Skynet locates and massacres them thirty miles outside of Los Angeles. Over seventy people die; three make it back to Eagle Rock, where another dies and the remaining two nearly bleed out alongside her.

The rumors had come from a combination of small scouting groups and a few refugees who had been surviving in the less-decimated countryside, so the loss of so many soldiers is compounded by everyone’s attempt to figure out whether the information was bad or if someone had given them over to Skynet.

Serrano Point and everyone in the tunnels are on high alert for weeks. No answers are forthcoming, though, and if Skynet has been tipped off, no machines seem interested in Serrano Point. Though things wind down to normal by year’s end, it’s a rough stretch of months for everyone. The brass seems to be meeting near-constantly, reviewing new information (or the lack thereof) and theories about what went wrong, and it doesn’t help that everyone down to the prepubescent tunnel rats who ferry food supplies to the building has their own ideas.

Whatever time Savannah doesn’t spend trying to fruitlessly hash out answers with the others seems to be occupied by desperately reconfiguring a schedule meant to orchestrate far more people. The added security measures mean they’re stretched thin just for routine sentries, and they’ve lost so many soldiers able to handle ops that the more experienced ones who remain are on duty almost constantly. The result is that she hardly sees Derek, who’s risen rather rapidly in the ranks in light of recent events, and they’re both too tired for much more than a hello two-thirds of the time anyway.

The year winds down very differently than it began, Savannah notices—it seems that no amount of preparation, effective prophecy, or sheer force of will can keep the reality of living through the end of the world at bay.


	5. 2022

** 2022 **

“Marty, you have to give me more regulars on base, or nobody’s going to have time to sleep, let alone eat! The number of people who’ve lost all semblance of downtime just so we can make sure there are two sentries at each post…”

“We can’t just do one sentry?” someone else asks. Savannah’s too close to seeing red to bother to notice who.

“No—especially not when we’re so short-staffed—nobody’s got enough rest as it is, so at least with two people they can make up for each other’s mistakes. Hopefully. If we’re lucky. This is why I need more people.”

“What about making the shifts longer, so people have fewer slots to fill?” Roxy offers.

Savannah gapes at her. “How do you think _that_ would solve the problem of not sleeping?”

“Enough,” Sarah snaps, cutting off whatever Marty is about to say. “Savannah, people are just going to have to deal. Learn to operate on less. We’re fighting a war, and now more than ever we can’t afford to get comfortable. But—maybe you can start pulling from some of the support teams? Just here and there? Even the folks in the kitchens or inventory or your admin people are supposed to be competent enough to be here and not in the tunnels. And you can definitely sign up everyone in this room.”

It’s not enough for what Savannah wants to make happen, but it’s better than nothing. “Thank you. I’ll make it work.” A few of the people around the table look a little peeved about being roped into guard duty, but the look on Sarah’s face keeps any of them from protesting. Savannah spends most of the rest of the meeting scribbling furiously, wanting something to give to her team as soon as she’s out, but she’s still erasing and rewriting by the time the others get up to go.

Sarah lingers, reading over her shoulder. “Looks like that’ll keep us going for a little longer, I hope?”

“I think so. Thanks.”

“Where’d you put me? It’s been ages since I did the lookout thing; this should be interesting.”

“Uh…nowhere, yet. Any preferences?”

Sarah skims the expanse of butcher paper Savannah has been using and points to an empty square. “Looks like you need someone there?”

Savannah nods gratefully and starts to pencil her in before noticing who she’s partnered with. “Did you catch that that has you standing guard with Kyle Reese three days a week?”

“Huh.” She peers closer at the page, but her apparent nonchalance seems a little too nonchalant for Savannah to believe she hadn’t noticed. “Eh, that’s fine. He seemed okay when I met him at that thing with the puppies.”

Whatever Sarah’s reasons are, they’ve helped solve a problem and she’s too tired to care beyond that, so Savannah ignores her act and just says, “Great, it’s yours.”

***

Kyle either hadn’t checked the updated schedule or hadn’t believed it, because the next time Savannah sees him, two days after his first duty round with Sarah, his eyes are still glowing and he thanks her with an odd mix of youthful enthusiasm and adult dignity.

Savannah shrugs it off. “You needed a partner, she was free, she offered. I’m just glad it’s dealt with. She living up to your…I don’t know, wildest dreams? You’ve been waiting to meet her, like, since I met you, so…”

He grins. “Better. She’s…I don’t know, it’s just…she’s so _human_. I knew she was, like, smart and capable and all battle-hardened, but it’s like…she’s got a sense of humor. And all these odd stories about waitressing. She talks about you a lot, did you know that?”

“That’s…nice.” Savannah isn’t really sure how to react—Sarah can be warm and funny when she wants to, but she’s never seen her want to in front of just about anyone who wasn’t Lauren or Savannah herself. She thinks back to Lauren’s comment so many years ago about Sarah’s needing to bleed out some of her poisons and wonders if a relative stranger is bringing her something Savannah can’t. It’s an odd feeling—not bad, just different. “Sorry, I guess I’m just used to her.”

“Nah, it’s okay. I’m just—I’m really glad I actually get to know her, that’s all.”

“Fair enough.”

She tracks down Sarah later that night, about to bed down in her little closet, and very innocently asks how her sentry experience had gone. Sarah just shrugs, “Fine. He’s a good kid, like you said. And past the whole hero-worship thing. Nice to partner with someone who’s both not scared of me and not actively trying to prove it.”

Savannah chuckles at that. “Was that why you wanted to work with him?”

“What?”

“You picked the slot the other day, and I know you knew what you were pointing to…”

It’s Sarah’s turn to chuckle. “You know me too well, baby girl. And anyway…well, you needed someone and he’s all right. Might as well get to know your boyfriend’s brother, right?”

“Derek’s not…nobody really talks like that. Not anymore.”

“No? You’ve been doing whatever you’ve been doing for what, over a year? That has to count for something.”

“Like fifteen months, yeah. But it’s not like we’re going on dates, or…or whatever people used to do when you were my age.”

Sarah’s eyebrow arches almost to her hairline, an unspoken reminder of the fact that at age 21 she had a two-year-old baby and a gun-running gig in South America. “Baby girl, I think the no-labels relationship thing has existed since time immemorial.”

“Maybe. Well, whatever. It’s not like we’re getting married or anything.”

“You…okay?”

“Wha—yeah, just, things have been so nuts since the Santa Clarita massacre.”

“So…”

“So, we get to see each other when we get to see each other. There’s not really time for, like, romance.”

“Was there before?”

“Nah, not really. It’s how things are, though, right? I’m not really…we have a war to fight. I mean, you’d know that better than anyone.”

She hadn’t meant for the comment to sting—it was just a matter of fact that Sarah hadn’t been in a relationship since 1984. Unless you counted Charley Dixon, who had only been around for a few months and hadn’t even known who she really was. But Sarah blanches, visibly, and changes the subject to the kitchen team’s latest experiences so fast that Savannah lets the whole thing drop.

***

Derek, for various reasons, doesn’t find out about his brother’s new sentry partner for over a month. Whether Kyle’s bright-eyed excitement had receded or he was actively keeping it from Derek isn’t clear, but they’ve both had enough ops missions that they’ve been missing each other a lot lately, and, as Savannah learned early on, most people only check schedules for their own assignments.

Why Derek rounds on Savannah when he finds out is also unclear.

“You didn’t tell me Kyle was doing guard duty with her!”

“With Sarah? Does it matter?”

“Uh, yeah. I only found out because I caught him right after his shift this morning, and every other sentence had her name in it.”

“And that’s bad because…?”

“You know he’s got that massive crush on her. Since, like, forever—she’s old enough to be his mother, and—”

Savannah clears her throat, because it seems like he’s forgotten who he’s talking to.

“I know _you_ know that.”

“I still don’t get what the issue is. It’s Sarah, not…well, it sounds like she’s been perfectly nice to him, but it’s not like she’s going to encourage whatever you’re implying.”

“Savannah, he’s almost twenty. He was only thirteen when the bombs fell, but he’s hardly _looked_ at a girl since he hit puberty. Seven years ago.”

“Maybe having his big brother commenting on his every move isn’t helping? Anyway, he’s kind of an adult now, you know. He can make his own decisions.”

“Twenty, Savannah.”

“I was almost twenty, remember.”

“But you were _looking_.”

“You think very highly of yourself, Sergeant Reese.”

He doesn’t take the bait to change the subject. “Still. Can you move him around somewhere else? Or her?”

“Not without having to fuck up a lot of other people’s schedules and explaining to everyone and particularly to the two of them that Kyle’s older brother doesn’t think he can fend for himself. At age _twenty_.” Derek rolls his eyes but doesn’t protest that. “And what have you got against Sarah, anyway? She taught me everything _I_ know, it’s probably good for him to have her as an influence.”

“I just don’t trust her with him.”

The words come out of his mouth before he seems to realize he’s said them. She’s aware he hasn’t spent much time at all in Sarah’s presence, which makes the comment seem all the more extreme. “ _Excuse me_?”

“I just meant—okay, there’s not a good way to turn that around, but—”

“No, there’s really not.” She turns on her heel and stalks down the corridor toward the stairwell. She’s not sure where she’s going at the moment, but it’s definitely not Derek’s bed.

***

He apologizes a few days later, admitting that he got too worked up over a nonissue, but still pleads out of breaking bread with Sarah when she suggests it, claiming he’s filling in for someone in weapons inventory. Savannah knows off-the-books shift trades happen all the time and doesn’t usually care as long as everything gets done, but it irks her.

Still, that spring, she shows up to a basement gathering like the one where he’d first kissed her, the latest in an irregular series that seems to resume every time a supply raid produces alcohol. Savannah never loved drinking, but it’s Kyle’s twentieth birthday, so she knocks back a mouthful of something that burns her throat and lets Derek pull her into a throng of people to dance. They don’t have any recorded music, let alone the means to play it, but there’s a conveniently talented assortment of off-duty soldiers banging empty buckets and reproducing chart hits from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Between the alcohol and the endorphins, she feels a lot more generous toward him after half an hour or so, and she waves him off with a smile when a group of guys she knows only by name beckon him over. Savannah wanders to the side of the room to lean against a wall, reflecting that these things are much more tolerable than they used to be, when she is utterly shocked to see Sarah wander in. She’s dressed normally—tank top, loose pants, combat boots—but it looks vaguely like her hair has been brushed, and, relief on her face, she slides along the wall next to Savannah as soon as she spots her.

“What are you doing here?”

“Do you…do you need me to go?”

“Of course n—why would I need you to go? You literally just walked in.”

Sarah nods toward where Derek is standing several yards away. He waves to Savannah and then catches sight of Sarah—Savannah can tell because he doesn’t turn away quite fast enough to hide the scowl on his face.

“Yeah, I think he’s sleeping alone tonight.”

“Everything okay?”

“He just doesn’t like you, apparently. And I don’t really like that.”

“A lot of people don’t like me.”

“Yeah, but he doesn’t even have a good reason. Anyway, stop distracting me—what are you doing here?”

Her mouth twitches. “Kyle made me promise to come. Can’t imagine why—I didn’t know we had this many people to be off-duty at once.”

“Three different ops teams just got back; one of them found vodka or something. And one of the family bunkers just sent up a bunch of fifteen-year-olds who don’t know how scared to be yet. Ergo, this.”

Sarah nods and stares a little dazedly at the swarm of entangled people. “I told you, some things never change. People, sex, booze.”

Savannah’s not letting this one go. “You’re here because Kyle asked you to be?”

“It’s his birthday,” Sarah says, as if that explains anything.

“I know that, but since when do you— _what_ is going on with you and him?”

Sarah opens her mouth to respond, but Kyle himself chooses that moment to appear. “You came!”

“Well, I said I’d try. Uh, happy birthday. Again.” Savannah can’t decide whether to be amused or concerned by Sarah’s obvious and highly uncharacteristic self-consciousness.

“Thanks!” His cheeks are flushed with alcohol, which may be why the next words out of his mouth are, “Would you want to dance?”

“I…” she scans the crowd of people, most of whom are roughly two or three decades her junior. “No, I’m good.”

“Oh, come on,” he grins. “Birthday wish, right?”

“Those things don’t come true if you say what you wished,” Sarah points out. “Anyway, I came, and now I’m going to go crash. Enjoy your, uh, shindig here.”

She’s gone before Kyle can protest, let alone before Savannah can process what just happened, and they both stare after her in bewilderment.

“Well, that was weird,” Savannah says after a pause. “Tell your brother I went to go crash, too, and he can come find me when he wants to stop being an asshole.”

Kyle nods faintly.

***

“We’re sure,” Jorge says, tapping a spot on a map of Los Angeles the length of his arm. “Skynet’s started capturing strays and survivors in the hills, and instead of killing them, they end up here. Specifically, where Century City Mall used to be, if you’re keeping track.”

Sarah draws in a sharp breath, and everyone turns to look at her.

“That sound familiar?” Marty asks.

She nods. “In some timelines, at least, it was a labor camp. Never really found out why Skynet would need human labor, but…sounds like it’s happening in this timeline.”

“Shit,” Jorge says, falling back in his chair. “Yeah, it lines up. As far as I can tell, we’ve been getting off easy because Skynet thinks the only surviving humans are the pockets of surface-dwellers they’ve been picking off since J-Day. They don’t seem aware of Serrano, but we’re populous and active enough these days that they’re starting to notice that there are more of us than previously expected.”

“Could be worse,” Sarah replies. “I’ve heard about people who landed in Century as early as 2015—if this is the first we know of it—”

“—Skynet might already be weaker in our reality than in some of the others,” Marty finishes. “Well, that’s not nothing. Hopefully, it’ll make rescuing those poor sons of bitches and finding out what’s going on that much easier. We can’t just ignore it.” Everyone nods, although some more slowly than others.

“How about sending the 132nd?” Justin suggests. “They’re a good mix of tough and smart. Been proving themselves recently. Wells, Gibbon, Reese—the younger one, I mean—Manders, Weinbaum…eh, I don’t remember all the names, but they get results. Although I’m not sure what it says that their top dog stepped on a land mine last month.”

“So, we replace Chad Sorrell and send them out,” Ray agrees. “You’re right, that group is a good fit for this. Talented but…”

“Not the best of our best, so if they don’t come back, we haven’t lost as much as we could have,” Jorge says, and everyone flinches. “It’s true. You all know it. This isn’t going to be one of those things everyone comes back from. But we do need to know what they’re doing at Century, and that team could find out. And if there _are_ prisoners we can free…”

“I’ll go,” Sarah says. A dozen heads whip around to look at her, none faster than Savannah’s. “If it’s that important, it should be one of us putting our neck out. So that can be me.”

“We can’t—” Marty begins.

She cuts him off. “You can spare me just as much as you can spare anyone else. And if you don’t believe that, then you’re just planning on sending the whole damn unit on a death march.”

There’s a pregnant pause. Marty and Ray exchange a series of looks, and finally Marty says, “Okay. But do your best to come back, Connor.”

“I always do,” Sarah says, an unreadable expression in her eyes.

***

Savannah just manages to grab her by the arm on the empty back stairwell. “You just volunteered. Sarah—”

“That unit needs a commander. Might as well be me.”

“They’re going on a suicide mission!”

“They’re going on a critical intel and rescue mission. You know that.”

“I know everyone thinks it’s a suicide mission, and you just raised your hand.”

“If one of the brass is going on it, people won’t think it’s a suicide mission. They’ll know it’s important. Which it is.”

“You don’t care what people think as long as they’re fighting for the same cause you are. You don’t even know most of the people _in_ the damn unit, except—” There’s a flash of something on Sarah’s face that Savannah can’t quite pinpoint, but she realizes the connection. “Except Kyle. You don’t even—why is  your sentry partner so important that you’re just going to up and leave—leave _me_ , and, and everyone—just to…” Savannah hasn’t cried in years, but she feels the strange itch in her nose that signals this might be the moment to break her streak.

Sarah looks around furtively, making sure they’re alone on the stairwell. “Because Kyle Reese has to stay alive, and I’d rather be the one to do it than to risk you. And I sure as hell wouldn’t trust anyone else to make sure he gets back.”

“Why him? Sarah, why is one twenty-year-old kid more important than—”

“He’s John’s father.”

Savannah freezes mid-gesture. There’s a loud pounding in her ears, so loud she can’t hardly hear Sarah speak. Sarah grabs her by the shoulders and gives her the kind of hard shake that clears her head. “Baby girl, you with me?”

“Yeah, no, I…what?”

“In ’84. He’s the one who gets sent back. Saves my life, knocks me up, gets killed two days later. If he dies on this op, or anytime before he jumps back…”

“No John.” Savannah’s stomach plunges. It shouldn’t be surprising, even after thirteen years, that Sarah would be determined to keep the possibility of her lost child alive, whether at the expense of her existing one or not.

But Sarah shakes her head. “It’s not just him, baby girl. I mean, it is, but…he’s the reason _any_ of this happened. No John means no training for me, no experience, none of that. I’d probably have gotten myself killed in the process years ago if I didn’t have someone depending on me. No John means we don’t jump from ’99 to 2007. Which means we don’t keep pushing back J-Day from there, which means no _you_. And no organization, no brass, no Lauren and Sydney, no prep, or bunkers…we need Kyle, or none of that is possible. We’ve built a lot of good in this damn timeline and I won’t see it wasted.”

“You said two days? Sarah, you knew him for _two days_? How could you possibly—”

“Two days. Two days, and I’ve been seeing his face, hearing his voice for almost three _decades_. There’s no one else I would’ve trusted. No one else I would’ve…well. Savannah, it has to be him.”

“Did John know?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you _tell_ me?”

“I didn’t tell _anyone_. His uncle only knew because he saw the resemblance and put it together—”

 “His uncle— _Derek_. He— _Derek_ is the one who dies saving me? That’s his body in the living room, with…oh my God. How could you _not_ tell me? From the start, how could you—” Savannah’s never fainted in her life, but she feels like she’s starting to sway on the spot. She half-collapses onto the closest step, willing herself not to cry or faint or do anything but find out what the _hell_ Sarah was thinking.

Sarah settles next to her, and, after a pause, wraps an arm around her shoulders. “I know I should’ve, baby girl, but I…it seemed like you were making friends, and he made you happy, and I didn’t want to mess that up for you. Especially not by getting involved with Kyle…”

Savannah sniffs, “I wouldn’t’ve cared if you got involved with him, you know. He’s had a crush on your forever and I didn’t care. I guess Derek probably would, but…why _wouldn’t_ you, if you’re so in love with him? He’s _here_ , he’s alive, you know he’s nuts about you…does knowing the ending make that much of a difference?”

“Savannah, he’s barely twenty. He’s younger than you are.”

“Nobody’s that young here. You taught me that.”

“Savannah…”

“Why are you even letting him go out there, then?”

“When I met him before, he had a tattoo from a Skynet labor camp. The one we’re looking for on this mission. He was there for six years—supposedly with John.”

“Just because he was there in some other timeline—”

“Savannah, I have to make sure. I have to make sure he survives and he has to be ready to go back someday. That’s been true in every timeline I know of, and I _have to go_.”

“I’ll come after you. If they catch you, I’ll get a team—Derek—we can—”

“Savannah—”

“Don’t tell me not to take risks for you, Sarah! You raised me to be brave, not cautious!” She starts to stand up, but Sarah presses a hand into her shoulder.

“If something happens to us—”

“We already know where you’ll be.”

“You know where we’ll be trying to go. You don’t know where they would take us. Or how to get in, and out, without putting more lives at risk. You want to rally the troops to come after me, fine, obviously I won’t be here to stop you. But you have to promise me you’ll be prepared. I raised you to be brave, not stupid.  Sometimes you just have to wait.” She kneels in front of Savannah. “Please, baby girl, promise me you’ll be smart. You won’t go chasing after me unless you _know_.”

“What about keeping Kyle safe?”

“He makes it back, you do what needs doing.”

“And Derek? You don’t want him to know anything, do you? Even though—he doesn’t even know why he doesn’t like you.”

“I told you, if anyone—if Skynet finds out, they’re at risk. The same way you were, and John was.”

“You don’t think they have a right to—you know how they’re both going to _die_.”

“Would you want to know how you’re going to die? I don’t. I’ve been trying to change my own damn future since I was nineteen. And telling that story—that’s asking him to be ready to die for me. I can’t do that to him. Not yet, anyway. And John…I…” Her voice breaks a little. “How can I tell him that we had a son, but I lost him?”

The look on her face—a distinct blend of grief and determination that only Sarah could compose—makes Savannah’s breath catch in her throat. She’s so rarely emotional, but the still-raw wound of John’s departure—and the possibility that he might never be born—renders Sarah more vulnerable than Savannah’s ever seen her. Savannah has spent half her life trying not to be jealous of her ghost of a foster brother, and Sarah’s done her best not to put her in his shadow, but, in this moment, she realizes just how much John and his future and his choices have shaped their shared parent.

“I promise not to do anything stupid,” she says finally. “And I won’t tell anyone. Just—just please try to come back.”

“I’d walk through fire to get back to you, baby girl, don’t worry. I’m not planning on dying out there.” She settles on the step next to Savannah and pulls her into a one-armed hug.

Savannah rests her head on Sarah’s shoulder. “Why is it always up to you to save everyone?”

Sarah is quiet for nearly half a minute before she replies softly, “I don’t know, baby girl. But it always has to be someone. Might as well be me again.”

***

They leave within the week, on a hot July morning, with provisions for a full month and as much ammunition as they can carry. Sharp pangs of loneliness needle Savannah near-constantly in the days that follow; she throws herself in work, takes extra shifts wherever there are openings, and only sleeps when she knows her body won’t wait to collapse from exhaustion.

She’s never had much of an internal monologue, but the idea of letting her mind wander these days is unbearable.

The expected month passes, then another, and then another. The 132nd hasn’t been in communication since its second week out, and there are no signs of stragglers trying to get back to base. Jorge’s scouts circle the Century area but can’t get close enough to collect new information without exposing themselves in the barren area and risking the discovery of the nearest pieces of the tunnel network.

By the year’s end, with no information as to their whereabouts, or even where to start looking for bodies, the twenty-person unit is declared missing in action and presumed dead. It’s an emotional blow to the entire population, but Sarah and the others go down as martyrs, and thanks to the shared responsibility of leading the Resistance, the operation itself takes less of a hit than it did after Santa Clarita.

That doesn’t keep Savannah from quietly crying herself to sleep in Sarah’s closet for the first time since she was seven years old.


	6. 2023

** 2023 **

Savannah refuses to mourn Sarah or anyone else until she knows for a fact that she should, but it doesn’t stop the periodic dream filled with skulls bobbing in a river of blood. Once, she sees her other mother’s face—her birth mother, rendered in metal—and watches in slow motion as her forearms become knives that cut faceless bodies to shreds. She resorts to her childhood strategies for avoiding bad thoughts—mentally rehearing gymnastics and sparring routines, reciting inventory, naming parts of guns or bombs or all the commands she taught Ginger in Spanish so many years before.

It’s not like being eight years old and afraid. Bodily, she’s secure and healthy, she can protect herself, and she knows they’ve built a good system at Serrano Point. But the fear of being alone in the world again—of not having the one person she’s always had—stops her cold if she lets it rear its head. She tries sleeping in Sarah’s closet at first, but it’s not clear if that helps or hurts, so she simply crashes wherever is closest when she hits the point of exhaustion.

Savannah buries herself in her duties, rejiggering schedules and taking on things that had been Sarah’s focus, like getting in contact with survivors outside of southern California and trying to figure out how to translate their occupation of Serrano Point into the next step of a broader strategy. This sort of macro planning is well outside of Savannah’s comfort zone—she’s neither good at brokering trust with people nor at creative thinking—and she lacks Sarah’s detailed reports on what happened in other timelines, but the resulting frustrations are still a welcome distraction. She turns twenty-two at some point, but no one celebrates it.

Savannah broaches the topic of Sarah and her family tree and disappearance with Marty once. Or, at least, she tries to—he says he doesn’t know anything more than she does, that Sarah knew the risks she’d been taking for years, and that she should just keep away from Derek if the facts of her past and his future are too troubling.

Derek himself is worse than nothing. She can’t think straight when it comes to him anymore—all she can see is his face on a bigger body, dead and bleeding, eyes dull and still. Meanwhile, he’s alternately sure that Sarah should have protected her unit—and his brother—better, or he’s trying to convince her to help mount a rescue mission of exactly the ill-advised sort Sarah had sworn Savannah against.

He’s as numbed by repressed grief as Savannah is, and they’re both so terrible at emoting that their relationship becomes a vicious cycle of blaming, screaming, and sex as an attempt to make up. She doesn’t consider telling him the truth; he probably wouldn’t believe Sarah’s story anyway, and Savannah had promised to keep her secrets, even now. So nothing changes and everything just gets worse.

It’s enough to make Savannah do something she has long refused to do—give up.

That spring, she finally makes herself look Derek in the eye and say, “We can’t keep doing this.” He stalks off with little more than a grunt. A fraction of weight lifts from her shoulders—small, but better than nothing—and it’s only then that she remembers today would have been Kyle’s twenty-first birthday.

***

A year and change after Sarah and the others left, Savannah is doing sentry duty at one of the larger tunnel exits with a good-humored eighteen-year-old intel specialist named Siri Sorensen, a now fifteen-year-old Allison Young, and a high-strung beagle called Pippin who’s Allison’s latest trainee.

Siri is explaining the perils of growing up with the same name as a popular brand of software—not something Savannah is familiar with, but Siri tells it well enough to elicit a rare chuckle—when Pippin starts barking up a frenzy. Allison crouches to check on him but doesn’t seem too concerned—he’s too young to be considered reliably trained and has already yipped at several passersby in the hour that they’ve been on duty.

Then, there’s a short, steady series of four knocks on the tunnel’s heavy metal door, and all three women freeze. Pippin whines and wets the ground.

“Were we expecting anyone coming in this way?” Siri asks quietly, keeping her eyes fixed on the door as she slowly cocks her assault rifle. Savannah shakes her head and follows suit; Allison pulls the dog out of the way and draws her own pistol. Savannah realizes that they’re both looking to her for what to do next, so she waves Siri slightly behind her and approaches the door. The same series of four knocks repeats, making them all jump again.

Savannah slides open a palm-sized window in the door, blocked by a metal grate, and stands to the side in case whoever is on the other side can break through the grate in one go. “ID yourself,” she orders, sounding more commanding than she feels.

Several seconds of silence stretch into what feels like forever before she hears, “I am a soldier with the Human Resistance. I am here to report for duty. I am a soldier with the Human Resistance. I am here to report for duty.” The voice is not only unfamiliar; it’s thickly and oddly accented, and there’s a precision to its repetition that can’t possibly be natural.

“Metal,” she whispers under her breath. And then, a little louder, “Guys, it’s metal—Allison—” The younger woman has already bolted to the nearest comms checkpoint, leaving Pippin behind, and Savannah nods to Siri, who readies a grenade. Savannah peers through the grate; they need to know what’s on the other side before they open the door, even if the notion is to blow up the machine outside and everything around it.

It occurs to Savannah that this could be how she dies. The thought doesn’t scare her as much as it should; a year ago, that might have been different.

Beyond the door, the tunnel is dark. The light filtering through the metal grate reveals just one machine, and it’s easily the creepiest thing Savannah has ever seen. Her understanding of Terminator-class metal derives from Sarah’s experiences and her own—Cameron, John Henry, the false Catherine Weaver—all of whom could pass for human, albeit with some odd qualities.

The machine waiting patiently on the other side of the door looks like a poor rendering of an already strange-looking middle-aged-man: seven feet tall, bald, impossibly thin arms jutting out of too-broad shoulders, legs like tree trunks, a rubbery face that a child might have sculpted from clay. Parts of the thing’s skin are colored to look like clothing; the rest is mottled and looks almost greenish in the dim light. She shudders and takes a deep breath.

Another exchange of nods with Siri, and she unbolts the door. “All right, soldier, come in.”

Savannah grabs Pippin’s collar to yank the dog out of the way when she realizes there’s a taser strapped to it, just like with all the dogs on duty. She pulls it off of Pippin’s neck, collar and all, and gets it up one-handed just as the machine lumbers through the door. The thing goes down a heartbeat slower than she’d have liked, but as soon as it’s lying on the ground, still as a corpse, she snaps at Siri, “Count to 60. A minute.”

The other woman obeys without question, though her knuckles are white around the grenade in one hand and her gun in the other. Savannah grabs her knife from its place in her boot and jabs it into the machine’s skull. The tip hits a metal skull just below the skin, and a thin stream of blood starts to dribble as she hacks off its entire scalp wholesale. She hears Siri gasp as she chucks the handful of blood-wet skin aside but ignores it; the latch shielding the machine’s processing chip is right where Sarah had said it would be. Savannah pries it open with her knife as Siri whispers, “Fifty-two.”

Her bloodied fingers slide against the smooth metal, and it takes nearly six full seconds to get a grip on the chip. As she pulls, the thing’s eyes spring open and its hand reaches up and back for her—and then freezes in midair. Savannah scrambles away from it on all fours, clutching her prize.  

She and Siri stare at the unmoving mess of skin and metal for several painfully silent seconds. She realizes Pippin is out of sight and sincerely hopes he ran for Allison, rather than out the door. Remembering that, she opens her mouth to tell Siri to close it, but Siri is already on it, though she still has a death-grip around her grenade in her other hand.

“It—it’s not supposed to be able to get up or do anything without this,” Savannah finally says, showing her the chip.

Siri nods faintly. “That doesn’t even look human. I always thought they would be—that’d we’d really need the dogs to tell the difference, you know?”

“I—they will be like that, at some point. Just not yet.”

“Should we—if it’s not going to move—”

“Yeah, put the grenade away. We need to get this chip to the tech guys and figure out how to get rid of the chassis.”

***

They end up just guarding the thing until reinforcements show up. At that point, it’s just a matter of disassembling the chassis for parts (the skin is disposed of, along with a few rounds of vomit that it prompts) and figuring out how to retrieve information off of the chip without alerting Skynet to anything.

There are multiple geo-trackers buried in various parts of the endoskeleton, which are destroyed as thoroughly as possible before several ops teams scatter the pieces. Owen’s team has rudimentary computers at best, but they’re not networked to anything larger, so they tinker until they can process what’s on the chip.

The findings are comforting, in a left-handed sort of way: this particular unit had been one of a series of infiltrator prototypes, sent to scout out human hideaways. As far as the techies can tell, it’s sheer luck that the machine had found its way to an actual entrance, but that doesn’t stop Marty from ordering an evacuation of the entire section and heightened security. All sentries start carrying tasers, and Savannah personally teaches squad after squad how to disable and dismantle a Terminator.

Her job gets a little easier in late summer, as does everyone else’s; a fresh batch of younger soldiers moves up from Kansas, Hammerhead, and some of the other bunkers and tunnel communities into Serrano Point proper. They also establish solid communications with Perth, Australia, which brings in a small but steady flow of personnel, supplies, and information from a community that was geographically decimated on Judgment Day but that has been largely ignored by Skynet since.

The first brushes of autumn come and go, and Savannah marks over a year since Sarah, Kyle, and the others should have been back. There’s still no news and no way to get within a mile of the Century site anyway, but she tells herself that Kyle and John supposedly survived six years of Century in another timeline—maybe Kyle and Sarah can make it through just the one.

It’s not a hope she shares with anyone, though. Jorge’s teams continue to monitor Century, but the brass agrees that they shouldn’t risk another mission without an alternative approach or at least new information—neither of which are forthcoming.

Solitude becomes her default state. In a way, it’s comforting—she dredges up some books from the tunnels and loses herself in history and how-to guides, just like when she was ten and things were so, so much simpler.

***

In the middle of the winter—harsher than the traditional California version since Judgment Day, but ultimately mild nonetheless—Lauren Fields comes to visit from Eagle Rock for the first time Savannah can remember since they moved into Serrano Point. She finds Savannah camped out on the floor of Sarah’s closet, pouring over schedules as usual.

“How you holding up, Weaver?”

“I’ve been better. Busy. You know.”

“Yeah, I…I’d been meaning to try to get over here for a while, but Eagle Rock’s been a mess. Haven’t had Sydney’s plague yet, but…this was the first chunk of time where I could get away for a few days. Since Sarah—I mean, since—”

“I got it. Thanks for coming, anyway.” It’s good to see her, even if there’s not much to talk about. “Why were you trying to come see me? If you guys are having comms issues…”

“No, nothing like that. I just figured you could use a friend, all things considered. And, well…not to be the bearer of more bad news, but I wanted you to hear it from me…”

All Savannah can think is _oh no_. The pounding in her ears keeps her from guessing what Lauren’s about to say.

“We had to put Ginger down about a month ago. She was almost fourteen—pretty good for a big dog—and…yeah. I’m so sorry. If it helps, Syd and I were with her at the end—even buried her outside. I thought you’d like that.”

It should bother her more, Savannah thinks, that the dog she had raised and trained was gone. But she’s so accustomed to not feeling anything these days that she just lets her face fall a little and nods. “Thanks for telling me. I’m, uh…I’m glad you two were there. She was a great dog.”

“Yeah,” Lauren, who’s still standing over Savannah, taps her foot a couple of times in apparent though. “Savannah, are you…do you have anybody these days?”

“What? I’ve been self-sufficient since I was ten, you know that.”

“Oh, don’t do what Sarah would do. You know what I mean. She’s gone—one way or another, I mean, she’s not here. Do you have, I don’t know, a friend, or…weren’t you with Derek Reese?”

Savannah glares. “Not anymore.”

“Did she tell you? About—you know, how he—”

“I know he goes back to before she met me. And dies. You knew?”

Lauren has the decency to blush a little. “I met him—Skynet tracked down my mom before Sydney was born and left her for dead. Sarah sent Derek to help make sure Syd survived being born—he was the one who told me why she was important. And her name…which was good, I’d never have known what to name her. Anyway…I didn’t know what you knew—and before you ask, I didn’t know it’d be relevant to tell you until fairly recently, and I figured Sarah would’ve…”

“She did. Right before she left.”

Lauren drops to the floor next to Savannah, ignoring the unfurled roll of butcher paper beneath her. “That does sound like the way she’d handle it, I guess. That why you broke up? Did you tell _him_?”

“No…she told me not to. I promised.”

“That sounds like her, too.”

“But…yeah, I just…he died the day she rescued me, did you know that?”

Lauren shook her head. “Sorry, Sav. That…that just bites. Although,” she digs into her rucksack, “I may have a solution. Or at least a Band-Aid.” Her hand emerges from the bag with a bottle of vodka—an almost-full fifth. “I don’t know if you noticed, but it’s New Year’s Eve. Or close enough. Wanna get drunk and hope for a better 2024?”

Savannah honestly can’t remember the last conversation she had that didn’t concern Skynet or scheduling blocks. “Um, you know what? Yes. Yes, I do.”

***

Two hours later, Savannah is easily the drunkest she’s ever been. The room is spinning a little, but the vodka has, in Lauren’s words, “mightily loosened a famously stiff upper lip,” and she finds herself talking more than she has in what feels like weeks—about things falling apart with Derek, about Sarah’s absence, about the recurring nightmares that she can’t quite seem to shake (lately they’ve involved what people are calling the Uncanny Valley Terminator with skin dripping off its endoskeleton). Periodically, Lauren asks questions—some serious and others less so, particularly once they’ve made a dent in the booze—but mostly she just listens. Savannah forgot how much she liked the older girl.

It takes Savannah’s exhausted and intoxicated brain longer than it should to realize what’s going on. “Is this your version of…of getting me to bleed out the poison?”

Lauren smiles, a little sadly. “Pretty much. I kinda figured you’d need it if you didn’t have anyone else to turn to. I know it’s been a while, but—I’ll try to come down here more often, if you want. No one should have to go through all this shit alone.”

“What about what you said with me and Sarah—about carrying other people’s demons?”

“I don’t know how different ours are, at this point,” she shrugs. “Sarah still had a whole bunch of levels on you, anyway.”

“True.”

“Plus…well, almost everyone else around here? Their lives are all divided between before Judgment Day and after it. They can look back and tell you how everything changed when the bombs fell. But us…we’d been living this for too long already, you know? All that happened was more people got let in on the secret. I don’t think I ever really realized that it would feel that way.”

Savannah wrinkles her nose. Her cheeks feel a little tingly. “Does Sydney feel that way, too?”

Lauren shrugs. “Hard to tell. You know her—she’s just so quiet and accommodating. Dunno where she got that. Mom wasn’t like that. But she’s okay, I think. She just started running the show so young, it’s like…everyone knows her. And vice versa. I think she was little enough that all the new people were good for her. Whereas, me? I just…I got so used to being alone, or close to it. Figured you might appreciate the feeling.”

Savannah nods vigorously. “Thanks for being here, really. It’s—”

She’s cut off by klaxons—the building-wide alarms that mean all hands on deck—and she and Lauren are out the door, armed, and running up to the roof, where the alert had signaled was the site of an imminent Skynet attack.

“You okay to—“ Lauren begins to ask as they rush up the stairs with about a dozen others who had answered the call.

“I’ll be fine,” Savannah calls back. “Been doing this too long, like you said.”

By the time they reach the roof, there are over twenty people scattered in formation across the blacktop, most hidden from overhead view. The source of the alarm appears to be a black helicopter hovering above them, close enough for a firefight but giving no sign of attempt to instigate one.

“Weaver!” someone shouts. “You’re ranking.”

 _Deep breaths_ , she thinks, inhaling the cool early-morning air and feeling more sober as she squints at the aircraft. “How long has it been there? Anyone?”

“We pulled the alarm soon as we saw it,” says one of the on-duty sentries she faintly recognizes. “So, just a couple of minutes. It floated down while everyone was running up—seems like it’s waiting for permission to land.”

“We don’t _have_ any helicopters, do we?” Lauren asks. Multiple people shake their heads. “So, we think it’s Skynet attempting to infiltrate again? I know their last attempt was pretty clumsy, but why wouldn’t they just be bombing us?”

“That’s why we rang the alarm,” says another sentry. “They’re not firing at us; they’re just…waiting.”

Savannah cups her hands around her mouth and shouts, “ID yourselves!” She’s not sure if who or whatever is in the helicopter can possible hear her over the chopper noise, but it’s worth a shot. It had worked with the Uncanny Valley Terminator.

A humanoid figure leans out a window of the helicopter and waves both arms frantically. Just when everyone is muttering that it could be a trick, the craft drops several yards lower. She doesn’t recognize the person—it’s not even clear if she’s looking at a man or a woman—but if it’s metal and not a person at all, Skynet’s improved its infiltration models quicker than they could have dreamed. Then the figure jerks back into the helicopter, and a different one pops out.

“ _SAVANNAH ELINOR WEAVER_!”

Savannah actually rubs her eyes and does a double-take, as does Lauren and just about everyone else on the roof, which makes her think she’s not actually hallucinating Sarah Connor screaming from a helicopter.

“ _LET US LAND_!”

“Ask her something,” Lauren prompts. “Something Skynet wouldn’t know the answer to.”

Savannah shrieks, “The bathtub!” She means it to be a question, but Sarah catches on.

“ _YOU DYED IT BLUE! WITH HAIR DYE! YOU WERE TEN! I LAUGHED! YOU WERE—_ ”

“It’s her,” Savannah whispers. Then, louder, to the others, “It’s her—it’s Sarah, it has to be her. Let them land! _Let them land_!”

The small crowd parts, with every person wearing a near-identical stunned look on their faces. The helicopter jerks down to the roof, and as soon as the blades stop spinning, Savannah rushes to the cockpit door and wrenches it open.

Sarah stumbles out, half-falling onto Savannah. She’s never been a big person, but Savannah catches her more easily than she should—Sarah is terrifyingly thin, with bones poking through the rags she’s wearing. She can hardly stand, it seems, but she hugs Savannah with surprising force. Savannah responds in kind, and it’s several blessedly long seconds before Sarah pulls back to look at her. She’s openly crying, tears running through the grime on her face along the grooves created by her enormous smile. Savannah is fairly sure she doesn’t look much different.

More people begin to pour out of the helicopter—she spots Kyle out of the corner of her eye—and the soldiers on the roof start to cheer.

Sarah whispers, “I told you I’d do my best to come back, baby girl.”


	7. 2024

** 2024 **

Sarah and the other survivors—thirteen in all—spend over a week in the med ward, being treated for everything from severe malnutrition to parasites to broken bones. They’re all wrecked, physically and mentally, and the medics end up sedating most of them to give their bodies ample healing opportunities. Nine of them comprise what’s left of the 132nd; the rest are newcomers to Serrano Point who had already been in Century when the soldiers had been captured.

Sarah herself has a terrifically wrenched ankle and bruises in an impressive array of colors, shapes, and sizes. Savannah visits her anytime she has a moment free, but, at age fifty, Sarah’s more of a mess than most of the others, and she’s not especially lucid for several days. Lauren, who had stayed at Serrano to pitch in, assured Savannah that she’ll mostly recover, though there are no guarantees on the ankle, so Savannah takes her at her word and continues keeping vigil anyway.

She runs into Derek twice in the first three days and he hardly deigns to look at her. Fortunately, Kyle is in better shape than almost anyone—he’s skeletal, mildly ill, and beaten to a pulp, to be sure, but he’s avoided any grievous or permanent injuries—and it’s nice to see both of them smiling. Still, she starts ensuring Derek’s on duty somewhere while she’s free to visit the ward.

Kyle is awake, if not fully mobile yet, when she comes to see Sarah about four days in, and as Sarah’s unconscious, she sits with him instead. He fills her in on what they’ve already told Jorge’s intel team: they’d made it inside the Century complex without incident, but a ceiling in what was left of the mall had crumbled on top of them, an event they were fairly certain was part of the ensuing trap. As predicted, Century was Skynet’s human labor camp—the reigning theory is that Skynet had been studying them in order to build better infiltrators, particularly after the failure of the Uncanny Valley model.

The prisoners had been fed and watered just enough to survive while machines had measured and prodded them, tested the limits of their physical endurance and tolerance, and occasionally broken someone in half to get a better look at how people fit together. They hadn’t been at Century for all of the many months they’d been gone—Skynet had been interested to see how they fared at high altitudes and in extreme weather, and they had been transported as far as the Rocky Mountains to find out.

The survivors had, here and there, been questioned about the whereabouts of their base and how all of these humans had survived Judgment Day. But machines had been more curious than outright murderous, and it sounds like the escapees had survived by luck more than anything else.

It’s hard to look at Sarah’s battered and unmoving body and think of her as lucky, but, when she wakes up periodically and smiles sleepily at Savannah, she feels like everything’s right with the world—or at least _her_ world—again.

***

“So, explain to me how the helicopter figures in?”

Kyle shakes his head in amazement. “We knew we’d never get far on land, at least not by foot, and they would’ve noticed any attempts to tunnel out. So it had to be by air.”

They’re sitting by Sarah’s bed; Kyle had been officially released earlier in the afternoon, but the medics wanted to keep Sarah a little longer, mostly to ensure that she would actually rest and sleep the way she is now.

“And you just…found a working chopper?”

“They’d been using these ancient helicopters to transport us, so it ended up just being a question of how to sabotage one—then they left that one in the yard for us to fix—they wanted to see our dexterity—and we made a run for it.”

“Who could actually fly a helicopter, though? Especially after, what, eighteen months in…”

He grins. “Who do you think?”

“Was his idea,” Sarah croaks.

“You’re up!” Savannah chirps.

“Don’t sound so surprised, baby girl,” she says, sitting up slowly. Kyle moves her pillow against the wall for support, and she leans back into it with a tired sigh. “Thanks, Reese.”

“So, the helicopter was Kyle’s idea?”

“Yup,” Sarah replies, popping the “p.” “I just agreed it could work. And flew the thing back here.”

“Team effort,” Kyle says, reddening. “We all contributed. Neither of us could navigate worth a damn, either, but Weinbaum got us back, and one of the new guys held the ‘copter steady so Sarah could get your attention on the roof.”

Sarah smiles at him indulgently, and he beams back. Savannah notices that at some point his hand has come to rest atop hers on the edge of the bed, and Sarah has yet to bat him away. They’re actually gazing at each other, to the point that Savannah feels like she’s interrupting something.

That’s when she realizes that at some point Sarah must have decided that a thirty-year age difference and offspring lost to time travel were no match for the chance to be with the person she’d be dreaming of for so long. Savannah’s experience with these things is pretty limited, but she’s positive she never looked at Derek like that.

***

If there’s one thing Savannah knows, it’s Sarah Connor—although not, sometimes, as well as she likes to think. Still, she knows to wait until they have some actual privacy to ask about Kyle—an opportunity that arrives a few days later when the medics finally let her out and Kyle is on duty elsewhere. She waits until they’re on the empty-as-usual back stairwell; Sarah pauses at each landing to readjust her crutches and debate whether to defy everyone’s orders by chucking them, so there’s time to talk.

“So…you and Kyle?”

Sarah looks up from her crutches with a start. “He told you?”

“No, but it’s not like he had to…you’re the closest I’ve ever seen you to googly-eyed when he’s been around since you got back.” She chuckles at that. “So, what changed? Last time we were here, you were going on about how he was too young, and me and Derek…”

Her face drops at the last bit. “Savannah, if there’s going to be—”

“There’s not,” Savannah says firmly, if maybe a bit too quickly. “That’s been over for a while. No problem on my end.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, really. I told you that before. Kyle’s a good guy, he’s been nuts about you since I’ve known him…I mean, as long as he doesn’t suddenly start trying to pretend to be my stepdad, why would I care? I mean, if it’s what you want and you’re happy.”

“It is and I am,” she says.

“So, what changed?”

Sarah maneuvers herself into sitting on a step. “It wasn’t until after we got captured—I’ve survived plenty of shit, but I’ve never had to keep so many other people going. Not when it was so hopeless.  We were losing someone every few weeks. He…he really kept all of us going. Kept reminding us what we had to live for, that we’d made it this far already. The helicopter thing was all him, really—he just asked out of the blue one day if I knew how to fly one, and then built the plan from there.

“We had this game, sometimes—we’d take turns saying who we were, where we were from, and then who we had to make it back home for. I always said you. He always said his brother. But at some point…I don’t even really remember when, but it was just the two of us, trying to make it through some cold night, and he changed his answer.”

“What’d he say?”

“He said he couldn’t die there without telling me he loved me. I mean, I—he said that to me, before, but for him that hasn’t happened yet. And I realized I had spent all this time in love with the _idea_ of a person, only to find out that the _actual_ person is just…just so much _more_. And I remembered what you said about how he’s here and he’s alive, and I just thought…maybe we could have more than two days. This time. The future isn’t set. So.”

Savannah tries to picture either of them in that scenario. Kyle is open and less emotionally repressed than most, but he’s not exactly sentimental. And there’s a reason most people think Sarah never learned how to smile. “So, then, it would’ve been you kissing him, right?”

Sarah laughs. “You know me too well, baby girl.”

“And now…”

“I…I don’t really know. I mean, we haven’t—it wasn’t like we had a lot of, uh, privacy or downtime or anything at Century, and I’ve been stuck in the damn med ward since we got back.”

“But you want to be with him.”

There’s that distant look in her eyes, the one she gets when she’s thinking too hard about John or her past. “I don’t know how not to.”

***

Savannah hasn’t really borne witness to many functional romantic relationships—nor has she exactly been in one—but she’s pretty sure they should look like Sarah and Kyle’s. His idealism and bullshit detector are good matches for her deep-running loyalty to humanity as well as her layers of secret histories.

The Resistance’s cause is their shared priority, and at face value, their relationship looks like plenty of others—sleep together, eat together, shoot together—with none of the formal trappings an earlier generation would have recognized. But to anyone who knows them—which is to say, mostly just Savannah—their warmth toward each other is clear. (As are other feelings; Savannah learns the hard way to start knocking before entering Sarah’s closet, particularly once Kyle moves his meager possessions up there as well.)

For Savannah’s part, she sees them both one-one-one as much as she sees them together, and if she doesn’t quite have Sarah to herself anymore, it _is_ nice to see her happier than she’s been in a long time. And, as she insists to Sarah multiple times—and Kyle just the once—she really doesn’t mind. Telltale noises from behind closed doors aside, they’re so undemonstrative as a pair that she rarely feels like the third wheel. It’s not as if Kyle is about to start trying to parent her, nor is Sarah going to stop.

True to her word, Lauren comes down to Serrano more often, and Savannah finds herself unexpectedly grateful for the renewal of a friendship she hadn’t realized she needed. Readjusting to her old self—not social, but not isolated, either, and happy with the balance—after Sarah’s return isn’t as fluid as Savannah had expected; she had grown too used to isolation and exhaustion to simply snap out of it, but having the non-judgmental ear of someone who doesn’t feel responsible for her well-being helps remind her to drift back to normalcy. Lauren herself just needs to get away from Eagle Rock sometimes; the endless parade of the dying and recently-born wears on someone trained to work in the field, and though she’d never leave Sydney for long, she clearly aches for peer interactions now and again.

For the most part, Savannah feels like things are back to the way they should be—Sarah within her reach, Serrano secure and running like clockwork, the future of humanity still being written.

Of course, nothing is perfect, particularly in wartime, and though neither Sarah nor Kyle is especially emotive and they’re not affectionate at all in public, somehow the fact of them grinds through the Serrano rumor mill within days of Sarah’s release from the med ward. Most people seem to fall into one of two camps: there are the ones who are impressed that Sarah’s taken up with a man half her age or that Kyle’s snared an older woman, and then there are the ones who don’t understand her interest in a tunnel-rat-turned-foot soldier or his in the unsmiling mother of the Resistance. Everyone focuses on the age gap, though.

Both groups are vocal about their opinions, and Savannah ends up getting an earful, particularly from her Admin team, who, by the nature of their work, know just about everything that happens at Serrano Point and beyond. Savannah tells them the same thing she tells everyone: _they love each other, it works, it really doesn’t matter if_ you _get it, and no, it doesn’t bother me, I’m happy for them_. Kyle doesn’t let himself get baited and has seemingly endless patience for explaining away any references to _The Graduate_ ; Sarah simply ignores everyone. Eventually the gossip migrates to other subjects and the comments die down.

Derek is very much in the skeptic camp. He loves his brother more than anything, so seeing him return from near-death with a girlfriend roughly old enough to be their mother throws him for a loop, especially as he’d been skeptical of Sarah’s intentions toward Kyle from the get-go. He knows better than to say anything to Savannah—who won’t turn on Sarah and couldn’t stop her anyway—but she gets a secondhand earful from Kyle. Derek isn’t about to cut Kyle out of his life, but he disapproves of his choices enough that it taints their interactions and mostly just gives Kyle more of a reason to turn to Sarah. Sarah stays out of the conversation.

***

Neither Sarah nor Savannah actually interacts with Derek again until Kyle’s twenty-second birthday rolls around in the spring. Sarah, who’s always had a thing for birthdays, somehow manages to conjure up a bottle of maple syrup (apparently a childhood favorite of his) along with instant pancake mix, and she recruits Savannah to help surprise him with the results. He’s appropriately touched and delighted, and they end up picnicking on the back stairwell with Lauren, an older Century survivor named Lisa Weinbaum whom Sarah tolerates more than most, and Vic Farrell, who had grown up in the tunnels alongside the Reeses and helped Savannah with her census back in the day.

She blames Vic for tipping off Derek, who shows up not long after the rest of them have settled down with their food. To his credit, he doesn’t make a fuss, and even stays to help Savannah clean up afterwards. It’s the first time they’ve been alone—or even really conversed—since she had ended things the previous spring; she’s mostly put the images of his death aside, but they rush back into her mind when she looks at him. She focuses instead on scraping dried syrup off a plate that has to get back to the kitchens and lets him make the first move.

“This was really nice of you guys.”

Savannah doesn’t look up from her plate. “It was all Sarah, really. No idea where she found the food. I just grabbed a couple of people.”

“You didn’t grab me.”

“You’ve made it pretty clear how you feel about her. And them.”

“Savannah—”

“I’m not trying to pick a fight; I’m just telling you why.” She tilts her head up just enough to see him silently working through the situation.

Finally, he says, “Fair enough, I guess. Kyle said something?”

“Yeah. Although I could’ve guessed. You’re not exactly subtle, and it bothers him.”

“But he’s still with her.”

“It’s a relationship. It goes both ways,” she points out. “I don’t know why you think she has some kind of secret nefarious agenda regarding your brother, but she really cares about him. Which is saying something for her, believe me.” It occurs to Savannah that ensuring Kyle lives long enough and is willing to jump back in time to save Sarah, impregnate her, and probably die again might constitute a secret agenda. But it’s not as if Derek could guess _that_.

“No, I get it. And he’s an adult and all, I know. But…just try to look at it my way for a sec.”

He doesn’t seem like he wants to argue so much as talk, so Savannah sighs heavily, sets the dishes aside, and crosses her arms over her bent knees. “Fine.”

Derek seems surprised by her concession, but he explains: “I know she raised you, and you know her better than anybody, probably. So you’re kind of biased. And I get that she saved your life, and mine, and his, and just about everyone else’s here. I get that. What I don’t get is—why does this woman with no personal history beyond Skynet and time travel and crap, who’s lived all these lives and has an adult daughter—why is she so interested in my little brother? Just this kid who grew up in the suburbs and then the tunnels? I get that she likes him, but why did she ever even give him a second look, you know?

“I don’t think she has some secret evil agenda, but since I still don’t have any actual answer to what should be a pretty simple question…yeah, I don’t really like it. It’s a little weird, and it’s a little weird that Kyle doesn’t seem to care. And that’s before you take into account the whole age gap, and the fact that you and I—well. Anyway. I’m not trying to start anything with you, I just…you know he’s all the family I have. And frankly, I’d probably be secretly hating whatever girls he brought home in, like, high school and college anyway. So it’s not _totally_ personal.”

“Why?”

“Oh, ‘cause they obviously wouldn’t be good enough for my brother.” Savannah’s confusion must show on her face, because he adds, “You’ll get it if you’re ever a parent, or trying to substitute for one. Ask Sarah if she liked me back before her thing with Kyle started.”

“If you say so.”

“Look, just…just tell her I said thanks for doing this for him. How’d she even know?”

“Lucky guess. She was saying that before you got here. Anyway, who doesn’t like pancakes and maple syrup? It’s carbs and sugar.”

“Yeah.” He sweeps up the last of the plates and silverware next to her. “I’ll bring these back down. See you around, Sav.”

She watches him go and realizes that she should probably have a bit of a side agenda like Sarah’s—after all, didn’t Derek have to jump back in time, too? The image of his lifeless body flickers in her mind again. Didn’t he have to save her, too? Not for the first time, she wonders if Sarah actually saw Kyle die—and how on Earth she can look at him and not feel like she’s being chased by ghosts.

***

In the late summer, rooftop sentries start reporting sightings of various ominous-looking aircrafts getting increasingly close to Serrano Point. The water filters start catching parasites and would-be-fatal doses of thallium. More ops teams, regardless of whether they’re heading away from the city for supplies or toward Skynet factories for information, are getting attacked. One radios back that a quick search for their runaway dog had led them to finding a stray surviving human; the gunshots and screams that follow make it clear that the machines have improved their infiltrator models.

No one needs confirmation from Sarah to know that Skynet is getting closer.

Tensions run high among the brass: Marty, Rose, and Jorge favor doubling down on their low profile while Travis and Ray are vocal proponents for a show of force, with everyone else falling somewhere in the middle. Consensus throughout the general population of Serrano Point appears to reflect that indecision, although anyone living in the tunnels or bunkers is quick to plead for continued secrecy.

Savannah’s instinct is to err on the side of caution and of Sarah, who leans toward the low-profile plan but hasn’t been especially loud about it. Although, as Savannah points out to her, how are they supposed to ever _beat_ Skynet if their mission becomes sticking to the status quo? Sarah doesn’t have a good answer, and neither does anyone else.

By mid-autumn, a hunter-killer drone finds Hammerhead Bunker, and the soldiers protecting the families there barely have time to radio for help before the bunker and everything within a 500-foot radius goes up in smoke. The tunnels leading to the site are caved in to the point that Rose’s engineers opt to abandon rather than try to re-secure them. The final death toll, including people who hadn’t been in the bunker but were nearby, surpasses one hundred—and there isn’t a single survivor to be found. The blast doesn’t settle the question of what the Resistance’s strategy should be, but it underscores the precariousness of their whole situation.

There’s an earthquake less than a month later; as far as anyone can tell, it’s naturally-occurring. Serrano Point is strong enough to withstand the tremors, but two more tunnels get wrecked beyond repair, and a shiver goes down Savannah’s spine as she realizes no level of ruthless organization or military discipline can save them in the long run.

Winter creeps up, and it’s the first time Savannah thinks—or is willing to admit to thinking—that maybe they should start waiting for a certain would-be savior—if only because the rest of them are stumped as to how to proceed. 


	8. 2025

** 2025 **

“Savannah, are y—oh, hey, Lauren.” Kyle skids to a stop in front of where they’re leaned against a wall in the hallway near the barracks, knuckles white around a half-eaten apple.

“You okay, Reese?” Lauren asks. Kyle is far from weak, but his poker face is shit, and he hasn’t looked so distressed since climbing out of that helicopter half-dead last year.

He flinches at Lauren’s use of Sarah’s name for him, shakes it off, and says with some trepidation, “Has Sarah seemed…I don’t know, tired? Lately? To you guys?”

“I don’t think she’s gotten a decent night’s sleep since the 1980s,” Lauren replies. “But that’s not really news. As I’m sure you’re aware.”

Kyle shakes his head. “It’s not that. I just—it just seems like she’s, I don’t know…more sluggish. Quieter. And, uh, she’d probably kill me for saying this, but in bed—”

“I’m just gonna stop you right there before you get all of us in trouble,” Lauren says, with a cheeky grin that does a poor job of masking her concern. “Give me some specifics. Preferably without the details of your sex life.”

Kyle starts to describe the patterns he’s noticed—Sarah’s exhausted and actually sleeping more but waking up with night sweats. Her neck is sensitive to touch. She still hasn’t staked out a position on retaliating-or-not against Skynet’s latest strike. She started shaking on sentry duty an hour or two ago like she was having a seizure.

Savannah watches the look of growing dread deepen on Lauren’s face as he speaks, but it’s not until he mentions a trio of purplish-red spots on her arm near her Century barcode tattoo that Savannah puts it together and gasps with realization. Lauren and Kyle stop talking and turn to stare at her.

“Lauren—what are those symptoms of?” she asks shakily.

“A lot of things. Could be nothing, just a string of coincidences, or—”

“Cancer? Could it be that?”

Kyle makes a strangled sort of whimpering noise and half-collapses against the opposite wall.

“It’s possible,” Lauren nods very slowly. “I don’t know that much about it—I really did trauma care back before, not oncology, but…Savannah, what do you know?”

“When they—when she jumped forward. From ’99 to ’07. The…the time-traveler that took her, she said there was a timeline where Sarah died in 2003. Of cancer.”

Lauren’s silence is worse than any response she could have given, but Kyle cuts in. “Wait, but—1999 to 2003? That’s just four years. It’s been way longer than that since she jumped; we don’t know anything, really. Not for sure, anyway. Maybe Lauren’s right, and it’s just…” He trails off, realizing how desperate he sounds.

Unwilling to speculate, Savannah says, “I’ll cut down her scheduled duties where I can—we’re getting more and more shorthanded, but maybe she can do something that doesn’t take a lot of physical energy.”

“She’ll notice,” Kyle points out.

“So? Lauren, make sure she goes to see one of the medics. Or, inspect her yourself; she probably trusts you more than anyone else on that front.” Lauren nods in agreement. “And Kyle—well, between all of us we can try to make sure she actually takes the time to get better from whatever’s wrong. If she—I mean—if—if we can—”

Savannah feels her heart rate speeding up; it’s the like the day Sarah had told her about Kyle’s and Derek’s futures—suddenly she’s seeing stars and can’t catch her breath. It’s lucky she’s sitting, because every one of her muscles has either gone stiff or been completely drained of energy. Everything goes black, just for a moment, and then Lauren is snapping her fingers in front of Savannah’s face.

“Hey! Weaver! Open your eyes, lady. Listen to me.”

Savannah’s entire body jerks, and the air comes rushing back into her lungs. “What—why am I on the floor?”

“You fainted.” Kyle, who’s holding her head in both hands, sounds almost amused underneath the worry.

“I’m okay. Just—just a panic attack or something,” she says. Lauren looks skeptical, given the content of their earlier conversation, so she adds, “I swear, this hasn’t ever happened before. The fainting, I mean. Really. Monitor me if you want, but I’m fine.”

Lauren stares at her, hard, for several seconds and then nods. “Yeah, probably. Make sure you hydrate a lot, though, just in case. And if anything changes—”

“I promise to tell you. But really, I’m fine.”

“Yeah…but Sarah’s not. And she’s going to take some convincing of that.”

***

Savannah ends up being the one to convince Sarah that something is wrong, after she brushes off Kyle as overly concerned and Lauren as a too-paranoid medical professional. Sarah’s never been a good caretaker of herself, but when Savannah points out the spots on her arm—ominously arranged in a triangle pattern she knows Sarah recognizes—her resolve starts to crumble. When Savannah adds, “You know I think you’re a superhero, and you know something is off. Just let someone figure out what. If you won’t do it for yourself, do it for me, or for Kyle, or for whoever else could get you over to a medic,” she caves.

She and Sarah end up trekking out to Eagle Rock, where fewer people will gossip and where they can find Helena Hayes, whom Sarah trusts more than most of the medics given their pre-Judgment Day history and Helena’s more recent experience with tending to the particularly infirm. Her tools are rudimentary at best, but she takes a couple of blood samples and asks detailed questions about Sarah’s various symptoms. Savannah makes Sarah admit to the cancer prophecy and passes along written notes from Kyle, who’s on duty. Helena winces visibly with each new piece of evidence, and when she lifts Sarah’s shirt, she gasps at what turns out to be a very enlarged spleen.

While Helena reviews the notes, Sarah squeezes Savannah’s hand so hard she thinks it might break. There’s no way this ends well, whatever’s going on, and it takes all the willpower Savannah can muster to focus on her adoptive mother rather than letting herself black out again.

After a few minutes that feel like an eternity, Helena says, “I’ll do what blood work I can, and with the instruments we’ve got, we might not ever know for sure, but…if you think you were at risk for leukemia, that’s what it’s looking like. Maybe acute, if it’s come on this fast, but maybe not, if you’re still standing and trying to make the case that you’re fine. We can try a few different drugs that we do have access to, and we should talk about removing your spleen, but…”

“…no chemo,” Savannah realizes.

Helena shakes her head. “No chemotherapy, no stem cell treatments, no fancy drug. Sarah, I’m so sorry.”

Sarah’s face doesn’t even move. She loosens her grip on Savannah, and quietly asks, “How long do I have?”

“If it’s really acute…could be a month. Longer, if it’s chronic. It’s…it’s really hard to say, and we just don’t have the tools to give you a better answer. I can give you some of whatever we have on hand—and the guys at Serrano might have more—but…”

“Borrowed time from here on out. Got it,” Sarah says tonelessly. Savannah feels like she’s going to vomit.

They catch a transport—a repurposed and retrofitted golf cart that can fit in the tunnels—back to base, sitting side-by-side, legs dangling off the back. They’re set off from the driver by a stack of food crates, and Savannah mostly stares at the ground moving under their feet, concentrating on breathing normally. Her mind is a panicked blank, she can’t even look at Sarah, and she nearly falls off the cart when Sarah’s hand comes to rest on hers.

“You okay, baby girl?”

“Me? I’m—you’re the one who—” Savannah can feel her pulse start to race again, but she turns toward Sarah anyway. Sarah isn’t looking at her—just staring at her own feet—but her cheeks are wet and her features are slack with apparent grief.

Savannah settles her head onto Sarah’s shoulder and reins her breathing in again. Sarah gently kisses the crown of her hair then leans her head against Savannah’s. The rest of the hourlong ride back is silent but for the rumble of machinery beneath them.

***

The only thing Savannah has to be grateful for in the ensuing months is that they’re not quite as bad as when Skynet had taken the 132nd. Sarah gets noticeably sicker at a steady clip, but Savannah and Kyle have each other to lean on, and Lauren comes to Serrano Point to check on things more and more until she finally just transfers. Sydney is seventeen now, and Lauren says they need her more at base. Sarah refuses to move out of her closet, and Kyle refuses to leave Sarah, so he’s with her the most, but Savannah makes sure one of the three of them is around to keep an eye on her as much as possible.

A month goes by, and then two. Sarah lets them keep her eating and walking upright, but she continues to weaken until she can’t walk for more than a few minutes without support. She sheds weight at a terrifying rate—out of her earshot, Kyle says she looked healthier in Century—and develops more lesions. The medics remove her spleen, but without what had so recently been modern hospital equipment, there’s only so much they can do.

Savannah nurses Sarah as best she can, but for all her training and experience in so many areas, she’s stuck with very little sense of how to really, physically care for someone. She memorizes the medicinal cocktails that Helena suggests, learns the signs for Sarah’s various pains and discomforts and how to respond, and can change a bedpan without batting an eyelash. But she never knows what to say to Sarah—and it doesn’t help that Sarah herself has become more reticent than ever, steering the conversation away from her illness without any of her characteristic fire. How is Savannah supposed to care for a woman who resembles her mother less and less?

Word spreads that she’s sick, of course, but the Resistance has survived without her before—in this timeline and others—and she has, at least, succeeded in making herself inessential both to morale and to day-to-day operations. Most of the brass, all of the Century survivors, and an assortment of other admirers cycle through. Even Derek comes by, though that’s more for Kyle. But the visits slow as Sarah deteriorates, and Skynet grows stronger, bolder, and smarter.

The Resistance grows worse for the wear. They lose Ray Rodriguez and several other top commanders in a strike by prototype hunter-killer tanks. For whatever reason, Serrano Point is still standing, but the drones take out anyone they can sight on the roof or in the water. The network of sentries with changing passcodes, trained dogs, and doors that are heavy enough to give even a killer robot pause seems to keep out infiltrators, but no one doubts that it’s just a matter of time before the machines figure out how to deceive the dogs and crack their coding system.

Savannah has never prayed in her life, and said life hasn’t left her with much faith in anyone but Sarah. She very vaguely remembers Mr. Ellison with his Bible and wishes she had something to fall back on, now. When it’s just the two of them, Sarah reminisces a little more about John—what he was like as a baby in guerilla-infested jungles, how he looked in the moments he realized he could be the leader he was supposed to be, why he took every death that happened around them to heart, even if it had nothing to do with him.

Savannah realizes that he’s the thing Sarah had put her own faith in for so long. But he’s gone, long gone, and Savannah has never broached the question of who she would have become if he hadn’t left. After sixteen years, she still won’t let herself think about the alternatives—and she can’t bear the possibility of Sarah’s honest answer.

But apparently even a world without John Connor still gets ripped apart in every way possible, sooner or later.

***

Few things surprise Savannah these days, given that everything just seems to be getting worse, but one obscenely hot June afternoon, a dazed Kyle finds her working in the otherwise-empty basement and asks, “Did you know Sarah had a kid?”

She looks up and him and blinks. “Uh, yeah, hi.”

“No, not—not you. She said she had a son who…left, I guess.”

Savannah carefully sets down her pencil and pushes the butcher paper aside, trying to wrap her head around this. “She…told you about John? Just like that?”

“Well, no, I…she’s got this scar, on her stomach. You’ve probably seen it, right? I know what a C-section scar looks like—my mom had one—and I know you’re adopted, right, so…I asked. She told. It’s true, though? I never know with her, sometimes.”

“Yeah, it’s true,” Savannah says, now feeling fairly dazed herself. “What else did she tell you?” Presumably if Kyle knew John was his, this conversation would be going a little differently.

He just shrugs. “She said he was supposed to save everyone, but then he stepped into a time machine and disappeared.”

“Sounds about right.”

“In 2009, she said, so you could’ve…”

“I met him, if that’s what you’re asking. But I was only seven or eight, and it was just a couple of times—I only really know him through what she’s told me. But she…she doesn’t really like talking about him. Until recently, anyway. When we started recruiting, she asked me not to talk about him, either. Said we shouldn’t be waiting for a savior when there was work to do.”

“Sounds like her,” Kyle says. “What was he like, do you think?”

“I don’t really know. I mean, she raised him like me, so I guess he’d be a good fighter, good soldier and all that. He would’ve had to have been pretty tough. But I think he was scared of what everyone told him he was supposed to be, so he left.” She doesn’t mention Cameron or John Henry or the false Catherine Weaver. No one needs to know how close she came to being raised by metal, or that their would-be savior had chased a tin can into some future. “Like I said, she never really liked to talk about him.”

***

As the situation beyond Serrano Point worsens, the Resistance grows more shorthanded than ever. They can no longer afford to let future soldiers help out on the supply chain and go through proper training; these days, kids as young as ten are getting introduced to guns and sent to fill in the gaps at Serrano while the older and more experienced fighters are out in the field—they aren’t giving up, not yet, and they still need supplies and intel. Even Savannah, who has hardly left the Resistance complex in years, ends up on several shorter-range ops missions—though it’s a kindness that Marty tries to ensure someone can usually be with Sarah.

Lauren is all over the place—tending to Sarah and various other patients, teaching field medicine to some of the younger recruits, patching up laser burns and broken bones outside. Kyle quietly rises to second-in-command under Lisa Weinbaum in the re-formed 132nd; Sarah’s illness has intensified his belief in their cause, and he’s more committed to preserving individual human lives than anyone Savannah has ever known. She thinks sometimes that, between the two of them, they can carry Sarah’s legacy into a future that still hasn’t been set…if they can all survive long enough to experience it.

By some miracle, Sarah is still alive come autumn, though on bad days she’s just a shell of her former self.

***

Savannah is making her way through the Admin team’s latest notes on recent deaths, injuries, arrivals, and other personnel changes over a plate of beans when Derek slides into the empty seat on the other side of the table from her.

“Question for you.”

“Hm?” She gives him a quick glace of acknowledgement before returning to a difficult-to-decipher line of handwriting.

“Do you know if Sarah had any relatives who might’ve survived J-Day?”

That gets her attention. “What? What are you talking about?”

He seems surprised by the intensity of her reaction. “Okay, calm down. Kyle and I were just on tunnel patrol with Fuller and that dog girl—Allison?—and we found a stray who said his name was Connor. Kyle was looking at him kind of funny, but he’s so protective of Sarah these days, so I figured I would ask before, like, doing anything. Anyway, the kid was mostly naked, so that would probably account for the staring, come to think of it.”

The gears in Savannah’s head all click into place. “You found a kid in the tunnels who said his name was Connor? Naked?”

“Yeah…said he’d been living with his family in the hills before they got killed, so he came in search of other people. Didn’t explain the nudity. Or how he got inside without anyone noticing.”

“Wait, Connor was a last name, right? Did he give you a first?”

“Yeah, it was…shit. Oh, it was John. John Connor.  Don’t worry about it—I dropped him off at the Admin suite. Your people’ll sort him out, get him armed, and if he’s halfway decent with a gun, I’m sure he’ll be on the frontlines by tomorrow.”

“Where’s Kyle?”

“He went right back to Sarah, like he always does—wait, so you think she’d know this kid? Is he, like, I don’t know, some long-lost nephew or something?”

“No—he’s her son.” Savannah drops her fork into what’s left of her lunch and bolts.

***

Savannah spots him, wearing too-big fatigues and looking a little lost, in the lobby area by the Admin office suite. He looks exactly the same, which, she supposes, makes sense; for him, it’s been mere hours since he saw her last. She takes a moment to make sure no one else is around before rushing toward him.

He stares at her blankly as she grabs his arm and yanks him down the hallway into the back stairwell, where she demands, “Where are they?”

“Where—who?”

“John Henry and the shapeshifter that was posing as my mother. You followed them. You showed up in our tunnels. Where are they?”

“How could you possibly…”John blinks and peers at her, searching for something familiar. “Savannah Weaver?”

It hadn’t occurred to Savannah that he wouldn’t recognize her. “Uh, yeah. Sorry. I guess it’s been a little longer for me.”

She can tell he has questions he’s hesitant to ask—for reasons of security or privacy or both—but she’s the first person who’s actually recognized him so far today, which seems to be enough. “How—how long?”

“Sixteen, give or take. It’s 2025.”

He nods dazedly. “Oh. I guess that’s not…I don’t know where they are, though. I got here and he was gone—then she just disappeared. Cameron—or, that girl, Allison, I mean—her dog wasn’t freaking out or anything, so they couldn’t have stayed too close. Why, did one of the other patrols find them?”

“No, but I need to. Without making it a thing.”

“Sorry, I really don’t know. I just wanted to find Cameron—her chip, I mean, not the girl with the dog.”

Savannah rubs her temples. “Shit. Well, we’d know if someone spotted metal down there, I guess. They get you sorted in Admin?”

“Yeah, it’s fine. I, uh, I didn’t expect everything to be this organized. I know there was supposed to be some kind of military, but this is really…something.”

“You’re welcome.”

“You did all this?”

“Well, parts of it, anyway. We didn’t have much of a blueprint for a future without you, so we got creative.”

“We?” he asks, suddenly hopeful. “Who’s we?”

She gives him the answer he needs—it’s true, anyway. “Me and Sarah. And whoever else we could recruit. She took me in after you left—wasn’t like I had anyone else.”

“You didn’t stay with Ellison?”

“No…they both thought I’d be safer with Sarah. I guess I was—we never heard from him after J-Day.”

John nods. “When did it happen? Skynet, I mean.”

“September 11, 2015. We were as ready as we could be—got a few hundred people into bunkers and had plenty of supplies stashed for after. Hasn’t been easy, especially lately, but it could’ve been so much worse.”

“And my mom? When did she…go?”

“Kyle didn’t tell you?”

“What?”

“She’s alive, she’s just—”

“She’s alive? But—”

“ _JOHN!_ ”

They both turn at the sound of Sarah’s voice to see her, a flight above them, clinging onto Kyle and the railing, her face a naked storm of emotion. John drops the small supply duffel Admin had issued him and bolts up the stairs with Savannah at his heels. Sarah reaches for him and stumbles forward; John, like his father, isn’t especially big, but he’s strong enough to catch her, and they collapse onto the landing in a fiercely tight embrace. Sarah might actually be crying, though with her, it’s hard to tell, especially now.

A few steps above his would-be-wife and once-and-future son, Kyle catches Savannah’s eye, and she thinks the look on his face probably matches hers. Kyle, though, sets his jaw determinedly and descends to where Sarah and John are. He gently places his hand on Sarah’s shoulder, and she lets go of John just enough to turn to look at him.

“I know this is a quiet spot, but unless you want to risk some pointed questions and a fresh round of rumors, can I suggest that we take this back upstairs?”

Sarah nods and rises, letting him support her back up the stairs, though she glances back every few breaths as if to check that John hasn’t vanished. John stares at them long enough that Savannah fetches his duffel and then nudges him to follow.

“What’s wrong with her?” he asks her quietly.

“Cancer. Not the good kind,” she says curtly.

“There’s a good kind?”

“Well…chemo’s not really possible, not now. And we don’t really have a lot of drug options, either.”

“How long?”

“She’s been sick…most of a year. The doctors have been saying she’s got weeks, maybe months if we’re lucky. But we’ve been lucky for a lot of weeks and months already, so…”

“I just…this morning she was thirty-five and she was _fine_. I mean, for her, anyway. It’s a lot to…” he glances upwards again, where Kyle is guiding Sarah into the corridor. “Are they…?”

“They’re together, yeah.”

“Seriously?”

“I would’ve thought you’d think that was a good thing.”

“I mean, yeah, I just…I just didn’t expect to ever…she’s what now, fifty or something?”

Savannah shrugs and gives him the usual answer. “He loves her. She loves him. They’re happy together, even all things considered, and he takes better care of her than I could on my own. The rest doesn’t really matter.”

“And now he—he takes care of her?”

“ _We_ take care of her.”

They’ve reached the corridor at this point. Kyle’s waiting at the door to their closet, and he eyes John with trepidation. “She’s all settled. You can go in.” John nods in thanks and hurries past his father, pulling the door shut behind him.

Savannah leans against the wall opposite the closet and lowers herself into sitting. She’s too stunned to think, or to even wonder what Derek did after she left him. There’s no looming panic attack this time; her mind is just an overwhelmed blank.

Kyle settles in beside her. They wait for several minutes, listening to the muffled conversation on the other side of the door, before he speaks. “Savannah, why does he look like me?”

“Kyle—”

“You said you’d met him before. You didn’t tell me he—”

“What the heck do you mean, _why_?”

“Savannah, it’s like looking in a mirror.”

She rubs her temples against an oncoming headache. “It’s not my story to tell.”

“The hell is that supposed to mean?”

“You’d have to ask Sarah.”

“But you know something. There’s a connection here. Savannah, please, she’s...”

“She’s asleep,” John interrupts them, closing the door behind him. “We were talking, but…how long has she been like this?”

Kyle’s gaze is fixated on his hands, so Savannah says, “Most of the last year. Come on, I’ll get you settled in the dorms. Kyle can keep an eye on her.”

He shakes his head. “It’s fine; I’ll just wait here until she wakes up.”

“Could be awhile,” Kyle mutters. “Just walking to the stairs before—that’s a lot for her.”

“I got that, yeah.” They stare at each other uneasily, and Savannah is struck by the realization that Sarah’s choice to keep Kyle in the dark maybe isn’t her best decision. “Thank you for taking care of her. Both of you, I mean, she—she talked about both of you a lot.”

“Nothing to thank us for,” Kyle says carefully. “She’s Savannah’s mom, too, and I…I’m just glad she let me become a part of her life.”

John nods, and Savannah can almost _see_ the tension between them. He seems too old to be sixteen, she thinks, and yet he’s still a kid, one who hasn’t technically lived through a decade of war yet and whose desire for acknowledgement from his unknowing father is painfully apparent. _Even if Sarah won’t tell him, or won’t let John tell him_ , she decides, _Kyle deserves to know why this stranger is staring at him_.

But Kyle isn’t stupid, he isn’t shy, and he doesn’t know how to pussyfoot around anything, so it probably shouldn’t be a surprise that he says to John, “How did you know Derek’s name? In the tunnel? I get that your story about living in the hills was a crappy cover, and time travel is naked or whatever, but that doesn’t explain anything.” His voice isn’t unkind, which, she thinks, John must appreciate.

“I met him before,” John replies without preamble. “Back in ’07. In some timelines, we started sending teams back to put together caches, carry out short missions, that kind of thing. He was on one of them.”

“But there’s not a…a fifty-something Derek running around—oh,” Kyle realizes. “Oh, he—he’s—Savannah, did you…?”

“She asked me not to say anything,” Savannah says in a voice so small she doesn’t recognize it. “She said if word got out about who had helped her in the past, they’d be targets for Skynet like she was. And John. And me.”

“How did he—?”

“He died saving her, actually,” John said, jerking his head at Savannah. “But he saved all our asses plenty of times before that. Mine and Mom’s. And, well, I…I didn’t really grow up with…well, with anyone but my mom, mostly. But he was around for a while, and that…wasn’t nothing.”

Kyle looks back and forth between them and fixes his gaze on John again. “There’s something…what am I missing here?”

“He’s yours, Reese,” Sarah says, and they all whirl around to see her kneeling in the doorway. She looks ragged and more tired than ever, but there’s a peaceful smile on her face. “Literally, I mean. That first time-traveler I ever met, back in 1984, the one who showed me who I was going to be? That was you. He’s yours. I probably should have found a way to tell you before, but…”

Savannah has never known anything of her own personal future. Her birth parents are long dead and buried in the past; the few time-travelers she’s met have never passed on any information about why Skynet would have wanted to kill her. So she has little appreciation for how Kyle must feel in this moment, meeting a son he hasn’t actually conceived yet and knowing that his life must end soon enough after to leave Sarah alone with him.

Still, his reaction is unlike whatever she might have expected. His whole face lights up with tears, astonishment, and probably a million other emotions. He hugs John close, and the look on John’s face suggests he never expected to be on the receiving end of such an embrace.

Savannah feels like she’s intruding on something private and looks instead at Sarah, whose right hand is covering her mouth like a shield to keep her from crying. Unsure of what to do with any of this, she settles down next to Sarah.

“Weren’t you asleep? Also—what made you change your mind?”

“The door isn’t that thick and…just, the look on his face and the way he sounded... John, I mean. He was always waiting for this, or something like it, and I didn’t think I could give it to him, let alone see it myself. Not without…” she pauses to catch her raspy breath. “He’ll take care of John. People will just think it’s because he’s my son, and they’ll leave it at that, so there’s nothing for Skynet to know. And you’ll all have each other, after I go.”

“Don’t talk like that, Sarah.”

“It’s true, though. Baby girl, I don’t want you to think you’re going to be alone, either,” Sarah says firmly, putting an arm around Savannah.

“I’m not really a part of your little family, though,” Savannah says, looking back to Kyle and John. “I’m no one’s sister, or daughter, or…”

“You’re _my_ daughter,” Sarah cuts her off. “Having my son again doesn’t change that. You are. You are part of any family that I’m part of. Got it?”

Savannah nods, still hesitant, but then Kyle and John are kneeling in the doorway, too, and it’s a strange and wonderful feeling, she thinks, to be part of a four-person hug.

***

She fits John into the duty rosters without much trouble, giving him Sarah’s old sentry slot with Kyle, which Sarah and John both seem grateful for. Kyle is harder to read these days; preparing to lose Sarah, slowly and painfully, has taken its toll on him, and she can’t pin down what he thinks of John—or the knowledge that, in a few years, he has to die for all of them. But he spends whatever time he can with John and doesn’t begrudge him much. John’s not to blame for how he came to exist.

Word of Sarah Connor’s mysterious other kid spreads fast, even by Serrano Point’s standards. Most people assume John is a seventeen-year-old as green as the rest and treat him as such. A few people seem fascinated by him, but he sheds most of those quickly—apparently Sarah’s reticence is genetic—save for little Allison Young. They’re about the same age and he looks at her like she’s fresh water in a desert. Savannah gets why, but it makes her nervous, though she doesn’t mention Allison to Sarah.

Derek mostly steers clear of all of them. It’s easy to see why Kyle feels responsibility for Sarah’s son, even not knowing the full story (which Derek doesn’t). For him, it’s one more reason not to trust Sarah, but he gives his brother the needed space to deal with effective step-fatherhood rather than get involved in such a sensitive mess.

Marty Bedell suggests that Savannah give John a few opportunities to train the younger fighters, on the theory that John is a decent teacher already but will at some point need to lead these people, and their trust in him had to start somewhere.

“You’re anointing him already?” Savannah had asked, more incredulous than skeptical. “I know, future savior of humanity and all, but…no one knows him here. He doesn’t know the first thing about what life’s like now, and he’s just a kid—I mean, I know where I was at sixteen or seventeen, but it wasn’t _leading_ the whole shebang here.”

“That’s why we’ll start him there. He’ll learn his way around. He’ll prove himself, and people will follow him, or they won’t and we’ll be no worse off for having one more competent soldier around.”

“But we’re already—we’re stuck in this holding pattern of getting picked off, and…what if he’s still the one who can find the way out?” Savannah doesn’t quite believe that—not yet, anyway—but Sarah’s faith can be infectious.

“If he figures one out, I doubt he’ll keep it to himself. You just let me know when he’s ready to be John Connor.”


	9. 2026

** 2026 **

It’s a quiet, uneventful morning. Kyle and John are on guard duty; Lauren is supposed to be on her way back from visiting Sydney at Eagle Rock. Savannah is taking a break from her usual work to wash Sarah’s hair, which is more of a challenge than usual because Sarah can hardly lift her head. She tries to protest but can’t speak much above a whisper, so Savannah assures her they’ll both be glad it’s clean and uses a couple extra rags to mop up the puddles after.

Sarah curls up on her sleeping mat, towel-dried head in Savannah’s lap, and says, “Baby girl, I don’t want to scare you, but…I think this is it.”

Intellectually, Savannah knows her heart doesn’t actually stop beating in that moment, but it’s a close thing. “Sarah—”

“It’s okay, you know,” she murmurs. “I mean, I’d rather not die at all. Obviously. I just always thought it’d be, you know, quick. Fighting. I’d be fighting.  Protecting John, or…or you, or…there have been _so many times_ I thought I was going to die that I…I wasn’t really that scared anymore.”

“And…and now?”

“I’m still not scared,” she sighs. She sounds coherent, though her eyes are closed. “I know you’ll be okay, and that wasn’t always true. All three of you…and Lauren, maybe even Derek. You’ll be okay. And you’ll be together, for a while, anyway. You’ll take care of each other. My boys and my baby girl.”

“I should…I should go get them, or—”

“They know. Or they should, by now. This long goodbye thing…I’ve said whatever needed saying, I think. I’m just so tired, Savannah.”

“Sarah, I—”

“I know you didn’t always believe me…Savannah, when I told you, but you…you saved my life,” she says sleepily. “You did. Back when John left, and every day since. You…please, just don’t ever doubt what you mean to me. Baby girl.”

Savannah’s eyes hurt, like her tears want to escape but can’t. She grabs Sarah’s hand and squeezes. “Never. Never, I promise. Sarah—”

She squeezes back. “Love you.”

Almost seventeen years to the day after Savannah met her, Sarah Connor dies. Lauren finds her an indeterminate period of time later, frozen and silent and still clutching Sarah’s hand.

***

They bury Sarah on a chilly, sunny morning. Derek improbably manages to pull enough strings to secure them aboveground transport—an old Jeep—and John directs him to a grassy hillside a short ways beyond the L.A. city limits that Skynet seems to have left largely untouched but for assorted rubble.

“Why this place?” Derek asks once they’ve secured the area. “I get why you wouldn’t want to bury your mom in the mausoleums down in the tunnels, but…”

“My father was buried here,” John says resolutely, squinting into the sunlight. “I think she’d want to be with him, if she could be.” 

Savannah realizes a lot of the rocks surrounding them are pieces of gravestones and goes to look at one before it occurs to her that Kyle’s gravestone probably doesn’t have his real name on it. And that Kyle himself is right behind her, holding the body bag, and probably having decidedly mixed feelings about John’s site choice. She turns to see Derek gauging his brother’s reaction, but Kyle just nods resolutely toward the lone tree a few yards away. “In the shade, maybe.”

Lauren and Savannah stand lookout while the others dig, and they switch out to fill the shallow hole back in once Kyle’s places Sarah’ body in it. When the grave is covered, all five of them stare at it quietly for a few minutes, the silence punctuated only by a distant airstrike.

Lauren finally speaks, “Does anyone want to say anything?”

“She knows,” Kyle says quietly. John is silent, his eyes fixed on the fresh dirt.

“I didn’t know her that well,” Derek puts in, not unkindly. “But she’s the reason just about everyone I know is still alive. Hell of a person.”

“She saved Sydney before she was even born,” Lauren adds. “And gave us a little family, after ours was…well. Anyway. She was my friend. And she raised a lot of hell and this whole Resistance to boot. If it ever ends, if we win someday—it’ll be because of her. Savannah, do you…?”

“When I met her,” Savannah says, speaking without thinking. “Sarah told me to trust her, and to be brave, and that she’d protect me with everything she had. So I did, and she did. She was everything to me for so long, and I don’t …I really don’t know what…what to do now. I don’t know how to be without her, even though I know she tried to make sure I could be.  But I know she’d be pissed if I—if any of us—just gave up because she wasn’t around.”

She knows she’s rambling, but it helps her realize what comes next for them.

“So…so we do what she would’ve done, right? _Be strong, be brave, trust Sarah_. We keep fighting until the storm ends.”

**Author's Note:**

> I own nothing and no one recognizable and I am only profiting from this work emotionally.
> 
> This timeline diverges from those discussed throughout the series, given the events of “Born to Run,” but many events, characters, and places from other canonical timelines are incorporated. Characters’ ages and other attributes are based on canon (as confirmed by the incredibly helpful folks behind the [Terminator Wiki](http://terminator.wikia.com/wiki/Terminator_Wiki)) or on the actors who play them (per IMDb).
> 
> Story title is from “[Radioactive](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktvTqknDobU)" by Imagine Dragons and series title is from Shirley Manson’s cover of the song “[Samson and Delilah](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CC2skFNaQc).”
> 
> My sincerest thanks to [red_b_rackham](http://archiveofourown.org/users/red_b_rackham/profile) (my once and future beta), to [ilostmyshoe](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ilostmyshoe/profile) (who came through in a pinch), and to [SusanMarieR](http://archiveofourown.org/users/SusanMarieR/pseuds/SusanMarieR) (for brilliantly putting my words into pixels for a second year running--see her shiny cover art [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/942385)).
> 
> Thanks also to Virginia Hankins, [real-life lady knight and badass redhead](http://virginiahankins.com/), for having a face that looks like Savannah's should.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [CoverArt for We're Painted Red to Fit Right In](https://archiveofourown.org/works/942385) by [SusanMarieR](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SusanMarieR/pseuds/SusanMarieR)




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